The Culture of Narcissism—Everyone Fixed at an Age Between Twenty and Thirty

Some years ago, while watching a program called the Vidal Sassoon Show (now mercifully defunct), I came across the quintessential example of something very fascinating about things that used to be exclusively adult secrets, and how this privacy has been lost. Vidal Sassoon is a famous hairdresser whose television show was a mixture of beauty hints, diet information, health suggestions, and popular psychology. As he came to the end of one segment of the show, the theme music came up and Sassoon had just time enough to say, “Don’t go away. We’ll be back with a marvelous new diet and then a quick look at incest.” Television is relentless in revealing and trivializing all things private and shameful. The subject matter of the confessional box and the psychiatrist’s office is now the public domain. Indeed, soon enough we will have the opportunity to see commercial television’s first experiments with presenting actual nudity, which will probably not be shocking to anyone, since television commercials have been offering a form of soft-core adult films for years, as for example Paris Hilton’s famous Carl’s Junior commercial. And on the subject of commercials—the one million of them that American youth will see in the first twenty years of their lives—they, too, contribute toward opening to youth all of the secrets that once were the province of adults, everything from feminine hygiene sprays to life insurance to the cause of martial conflict. And we must not omit the contributions of new shows, those curious entertainments that daily provide the young with vivid images of adult failure and even madness. As a consequence of all this, childhood innocence is impossible to sustain, which is why children have disappeared from television. Have you noticed that all the children on television shows are depicted as merely small adults, in the manner of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century paintings? For example, pre-teen Grover on the TV show The Neighborhood hangs out with only adults and has no friends his age.

Watch any of the soap operas or family shows or situation comedies, and I think you will see children whose language, dress, sexuality, and interests are not different from those of the adults on the same shows. And yet, as television begins to render invisible the traditional concept of childhood, it would not be quite accurate to say that it immerses us in an adult World. Rather, it uses the material of the adult World as the basis for projecting a new kind of person altogether. We might call this person the adult-child. For reasons that have partly to do with television’s capacity to reach everyone, partly to do with the accessibility of its symbolic form, and partly to do with its commercial base, television promotes as desirable many of the attitudes that we associate with childishness—for example, an obsessive need for immediate gratification, a lack of concern for consequences, an almost promiscuous preoccupation with consumption. Television seems to favor a population that consists of three age groups: on the one end, infancy; on the other, senility; and in between, a group of indeterminate age, where everyone is somewhere between twenty and thirty and remains that way until dotage descends. In this connection, I recall to mind a television commercial which sells hand lotion. Or perhaps it was for Ivory soap. In it, we are shown a mother and a daughter, and then challenged to tell which is which. I find this to be a revealing piece of sociological of evidence, for it tells us that in our culture it is considered desirable that a mother should not look older than her daughter, or that a daughter should not look younger than her mother. If there is no clear concept of what it means to be an adult, whether this means that childhood is gone or adulthood is gone amounts to the same thing, there can be no concept of what it means to be a child.

However, you wish to describe the transformation taking place, it is clear that the behavior, attitudes, desires, and even physical appearances of adults and children are becoming indistinguishable. There is now virtually no difference, for example, between adults’ crimes and children’s crimes; and in many states, the punishments are becoming the same. Just for the record: from 1950-1985 years, the increase among the under-fifteen-year-old population in what the FBI calls “serious crimes” exceeded 11,000 percent! That is very important because many people want to relax the laws, members of the Catholic Church want to make celibacy extinct, and this is an indicator of how more crimes will progress as we dismiss rule, regulations, laws and traditions to make life more accommodating for those who maybe need to just stop pretending to be what they are not and chose another profession. There is also very little difference in dress. The children’s clothing industry has undergone a virtual revolution within the past fifteen years, so that there no longer exists what we once unambiguously recognized as children’s clothing. Eleven-year-old wear three-piece suits and Stacy Adams to birthday parties, and sixty-one-year-old women were Daisy Dukes, crop tops, belly piercings and nose rings to birthday parties. Twelve-year-old girls wear high heels, and fifty-two-year-old men wear sneakers. On the streets of New York and Chicago, you can see grown women wearing lingerie, stiletto thigh high boots, a mini-skirt, and a men’s blazer that is an example of adults imitating the Catholic school girl uniform. To take another case: children’s games, once so imaginatively rich and varied and so emphatically inappropriate for adults, are rapidly disappearing. Little League baseball and Peewee football, for example, are not only supervised by adults but are modeled in their organization and emotional style on big league sports.

Junk food, once suited only to the undiscriminating palates and iron stomachs of the young, is now common fare for adults. It has already been forgotten that adults are supposed to have more developed taste in food than children; McDonald’s and Burger King commercials show us that this distinction is no longer relevant. However, I think that is because society is becoming less formal and extremely expensive. The language of children and adults has also been transformed so that, for example, the idea that there may be words that adults ought not to use in the presence of children now seems faintly ridiculous. With television’s relentless revelation of all adults secrets, language secrets are difficult to guard, and it is not inconceivable to me that in the near future we shall return to the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century situation in which no words were unfit for a youthful ear. Of course, with the assistance of modern contraceptives, the appetites for pleasures of the flesh can be satisfied without serious restraint and without mature understanding of its meaning. Here, television has played an enormous role, since it not only keeps the entire population in a condition of high sexual excitement but stresses a kind of egalitarianism of fulfillment of pleasures of the flesh: pleasures of the flesh is transformed into a product available to everyone—let us say, like mouthwash or under-arm deodorant. It remains for me to mention that there has been a growing movement to recast the legal rights of children to that they are more or less the same as adults’. The thrust of this movement, which, for example, is opposed to compulsory schooling, resides in the claim that what has been thought to be a preferred status for children is instead only an oppression that keeps them from fully participating in society.

In short, our culture is providing fewer reasons and opportunities for children. I am not so singleminded as to think that television alone is responsible for this transformation. The decline of the family, the loss of a sense of roots—just over 40 million Americans change residence every year—and the elimination, through technology, of much significance in adult work are other factors. However, I believe television creates a communication context that encourages the idea that childhood is neither desirable nor necessary; indeed, that we do not need children. In talking about childhood’s end, I have not, of course, been talking about the physical disappearance of children. However, in fact that, too, is happening. Our birth rate in North America is declining and has been for over a decade, which is why schools are being closed all over the country. And the idea of children implies a vision of the future. They are the living messages we send to a time we will not see. However, television cannot communicate a sense of the future or, for that matter, a sense of the past. It is a present-centered medium, a speed-of-light medium. Everything we see on television is experienced as happening now. The grammar of television has no analogue to the past and future tenses in language. It amplifies the present out of all proportion and transforms the childish need for immediate gratification into a way of life. We end up with the culture of narcissism—no future, no children, everyone fixed at an age between twenty and thirty. You even have adults, senior citizens, who are fixed on living like the corrupt politicians, law enforcement, and the little girls from Pretty Little Liars—mixing preteen games and lies with major crimes. I believe that what we are describing is disastrous—partly because many value the charm, curiosity, malleability, and innocence of childhood, and partly because we believe that human beings need first to be children before they can be grown-ups.

Otherwise they remain like television’s adult-child all their lives, with no sense of belonging, no capacity for lasting relationships, no respect for limits, and no grasp of the future. However, mainly I think it is disastrous because as the television culture obliterates the distinction between child and adult, as it obliterates social secrets, as it undermines concepts of the future and the value of restraint and discipline, we seem destined to be moving back toward a medieval sensibility from which literacy had free us. TV also has other effects on the body and mind. The light we receive in our eyes and our cell structure. This is the chain of events: Light passes through the eye to contact the retina. The retina has a dual function. The first is the obvious one: translating the light into images by way of channels to the brain. The second, equally important function is for the light rays, aside from the role as image creators, to pass via neurochemical channels into and through the pineal and pituitary glands and therefore into the animal and human endocrine systems. The kind of light that passes through the eyes determines the reactions of human cells. When it comes to even minute changes in wavelength spectra (what we call “color”)—say, between one kind of artificial light and another, or between natural light and artificial light—cause important biochemical alterations. Critical to understanding all of this is the term “light,” which does not apply to a single, monolithic element. When we speak of “light” we ordinarily do not make distinctions between natural light or artificial light; not do we make the distinction between kinds of artificial light. We tend to lump al of them together. One flips the switch to “on” and what one gets is “light.” When it is “on” one can see. However, there is where the similarity ends.

Natural sunlight is made up of all the radiant wavelengths of energy (spectra) that fit within what we call “light.” What is more, it contains them in a specific mixture. So much of this and so much of that. Artificial light from any source—whether incandescent or fluorescent—leaves out many segments of the spectral range contained in natural light, and it delivers an entirely different mix of spectral ingredients. Incandescent light, for example, emphasize the portion of the spectrum near the infrared while minimizing or leaving out others. Artificial light is quite literally not the same element as natural light. To use the same term for both is to destroy understanding. We learned in school that plants ingest light and then convert it to energy for growth. The process is called photosynthesis. The plant literally takes light into its cells and converts it into nourishment. For a plant, light is a form of food. Changing the light source so that a plant ingests one set of spectral ingredients rather than another changes the nourishment and therefore the cellular and growth patterns of the plant. If you grow your own plants at home, you also know this to be true. You may not have a microscope with which to watch it, but if you move a plant nearer to the window (or farther away), it changes. Plant stores now sell special bulbs which help plants grow. When you move the plant or buy the bulb, what you are doing is changing the amount and the spectral character of the light the plant receives. You are changing its diet. Through photobiology we are finally beginning to grasp that what is true for plants seems also to be true for animals and humans. For all, light is a kind of food. Humans take light in through the eyes; and via the retinal-pituitary-endocrine system, it passes into cells. The exact mix of spectral ingredients that we ingest affects many aspects of human health and vitality. As you change the light, you change the spectra; as you change the spectra, you change the light-nourishment that finds its way to the cells; as you alter the cells, you alter the human body.

Now, when it comes to memory, the more times an experience is repeated, the longer the memory of the experience lasts. Repetition encourages consolidation. When researchers examined the physiological effects of repetition on individual neurons and synapses, they discovered something amazing. Not only did the concentration of neurotransmitters in synapses change, altering the strength of the existing connections between neurons, but the neurons grew entirely new synaptic terminals. The formation of long-term memories, in other words, involves not only biochemical changes but anatomical ones. That is why memory consolidation requires new proteins. Proteins play an essential role in producing structural changes in cells. The anatomical alterations in a slug’s relatively simple memory circuits were extensive. In one case, the researchers found that, before a long-term memory was consolidated, a particular sensory neuron had some thirteen hundred synaptic connections to about twenty-five other neurons. Only about forty percent of those connections were active—in other words, sending signals through the production of neurotransmitters. After the long-term memory had been formed, the number of synaptic connections had more than doubled, to about twenty-seven hundred, and the proportion that were active had increased from forty percent to sixty percent. The new synapses remained in place as long as the memory persisted. When the memory was allowed to fade—by discontinuing the repetition of the experience—the number of synapses eventually dropped to about fifteen hundred. The fact that, even after a memory is forgotten, the number of synapses remains a bit higher than it had been originally helps explain why it is easier to learn something a second time. The growth and maintenance of new synaptic terminals makes memory persist.

The process also says something important about how, thanks to the plasticity of our brains, or experiences continual shape our behavior and identity. The fact that a gene must be switched on to form long-term memory shows clearly that genes are not simply determinants of behavior but are also responsive to environmental stimulation, such as learning. Furthermore, our intellectual skyline has been altered by German thinkers even more radically than has our physical skyline by Germany architects. My insistence on the Germanness of all this is intended not as a know-nothing response to foreign influence, the search for a German intellectual under every bed, but to heighten awareness of where we must look if we are to understand what we are saying and thinking, for we are in danger of forgetting. The great influence of a nation with a powerful intellectual life over less well endowed nations, even if the armies of the latter are very powerful, is not rare in human experience. The most obvious cases are the influence of Greece on Rome and of France on Germany and Russia. However, it is precisely the differences between these two cases and the example of Germany and the United States of America tht makes the latter so problematic for us. Greek and French philosophy were universalistic in intention and fact. They appeared to the use of a faculty potentially possessed by all men everywhere and at all times. The proper noun in Greek philosophy is only an interesting tag, as it is in French Enlightenment. (The same is true of Italian Renaissance, a rebirth that is proof of the accidental character of nations and the universality of Greek thinkers.) The good life and the just regime they taught know no limits of race, nation, religion, or climate.

This relation to man as man was the very definition of philosophy. We are away of this when we speak of science, and no one seriously talks of German, Italian, or English physics. And when we Americans speak seriously about politics, we mean that our principles of freedom and equality and the rights based on them are rational and everywhere applicable. World War II was really an educational project undertake to force those who did not accept these principles to do so. However, the German philosophy after Hegel cast doubt on them, and there was some relationship between German politics and German thought. Historicism has taught that the mind is essentially related to history or culture. Germanness is, according to later German philosophers, an essential part of them. For Nietzsche and those influenced by him, values are the product of folk minds and have relevance only to those minds. The possibility of translation itself is doubted by Heidegger. For him the Latin traditions of the Greek philosophical terms are superficial and do not convey the essence of the translated text. German thought tended not toward liberation from one’s own culture, as did earlier thought, but toward reconstituting the rootedness in one’s own, which had been shattered by cosmopolitanism, philosophical and political. We are like the millionaire in The Ghost (Geist) Goes West who brings a castle from brooding Scotland to sunny Florida and adds canals and gondolas for “local color.” We choose a system of thought that, like potato salad, does not travel; we chose a way of looking at things that could never be ours and had its starting point dislike of us and our goals. The United States of America was held to be a nonculture, a collection of castoffs from real cultures, seeking only comfortable self-preservation in a regime dedicated to superficial cosmopolitanism in thought and deed.

Our desire for the German things was proof we could not understand them. The decisive character of peoples and their values that was decreed by historicism of all kinds, but particularly by Nietzsche’s radical historicism, makes the German case the opposite of the Greek one. The difference can be seen in the way Cicero treats Socrates as opposed to the way Nietzsche does. For Cicero, Socrates is a friend and contemporary; for Nietzsche he is an enemy and an ancient. Given our country’s extreme Enlightenment universalism, nothing could be ore unwelcome to Nietzsche and Heidegger than our embrace. America, like Germany, also contains intelligent persons who were attracted, at least in the beginning and more so since the COVID pandemic, to fascism, for reasons very like those motivating the Left ideologues, reflections on autonomy and value certain. Once one plunges into the abyss, there is no assurance whatsoever that equality, democracy or socialism will be found on the other side. At the very best, self-determination is indeterminate. However, the conditions of value creation, particularly its authoritative and religious or charismatic character, would seem to militate against democratic rationalism. The sacred roots of community are contrary to the rights of individuals and liberal tolerance. The new religiosity connected with community and culture influenced people who look at other things from the perspective of creativity to lean toward the Right. On the Left there was only an assertion that Marx would, after his revolution, produce exactly what Nietzsche promised, while on the Right there was meditation on what we know of the conditions of creativity. Decent people became used to hearing things about which they would have in the past been horrified to think, and which would not have been allowed public expression. An extreme outcome in the struggle between Right and Left is inevitable.

The great mystery is the kinship of all this to American souls that were not prepared by education or historical experience for it. Perhaps the fantastic success of Freud in America was due simply to the fact that so many people were seeking refuge from tyranny, and there were very effective propagandists, or whether there was some special need for tyrants. This was also seen in Sacramento, California. Many people thought Darelle Steinberg would be a better mayor than Kevin Johnson, but they both seem like the same person. Their goal is not to help the citizens, but use taxpayer money to build and modernize buildings for entertainment. However, police shootings and overall police behavior was better when Johnson was the mayor. Steinberg seems really out of touch with the community. The assembled powers are not cosmic in nature, but historical. The chief function with which they are entrusted is that of judging the Earth and they have clearly not to judge alongside one another, but the Earth is divided among them; to each a land and a nation is specially allotted. Each of them is a governor for God, and, each, are to dispense justice to one’s people, both outwardly and inwardly. Outwardly they may all have fulfilled their office honorably, and each of them may have adequately represented the cause of one’s nation in so far as that cause was righteous; for God does not speak of this. It is unjust rule of which He accuses them all, more precisely, failure to act against social injustice. Instead of fulfilling their task of helping the powerless and the unprotected to obtain justice in the face of the oppressor, they have adjudged to this man, just because he had all the power, all that he coveted. However, how long can measured GDP levels grow before the bankruptcy lawyers arrives? As we have seen, GDP figures are grossly distorted because of their failure to take prosumers output fully into account.

If the economists assigned value to it, the total costs of health care would loom immensely larger. Long term health care costs in America are now $4.1 trillion annually. However, this underestimates the economic resources devoted to long-term health care…because most care is delivered informally by family and friends and is not included in economic statistics. It has been estimated that the economic value of such informal care-giving in the United States of America reaches $600 billion a year. Other researcher suggests that in the United States of America, family care for Alzheimer’s patients alone had a value exceeding $300 billion in 2020. And none of these figures includes unpaid caregiving for short-term problems. Governments and health industry officials worry that an aging population will mean more disease and debility, and therefore even higher costs. In the United States of America, pharmacies on average fill nineteen prescriptions a year for customers over fifty-five, compared with only eight for younger people. Health care costs for those over 65 years are thee to five times greater than for those younger than 65. Finally, add to all this the potential bankruptcy of pension systems as we known them, and the entire high-pitched public discussion plunges into the panic zone. There are, however, flaws in this overall picture. First, many such numbers are based on straight-line projections of past experience. That may be delusory in times of crisis or revolution. The longer-lived new generation will likely prove healthier than its parents were. Second, the same demographics that are increasing the percentage of elderly will reduce the percentage of young people and could reduce the cost of schools and pediatric care. Other financial offsets may also be possible. Nevertheless, none of these qualifications alters the need for radical reconceptualization of the entire problem of health in the twenty-first century.

Unfortunately, well-intentioned reforms based on industrial-age assumptions only make matters worse. To cut costs, politicians typically seek “efficiencies” that translate into assembly-line health care, a “managed” system offering one-size-fits-all, standardized treatment. Exactly as in low-tech factories, efforts are made to speed up the medical assembly line, essentially putting doctors into cubicles and allowing them only a few minutes with each patient. This is a self-defeating Second Wave strategy for a situation tht desperately needs a Third Wave response. In a business lagging behind other industries, smart pharmaceutical companies will soon transition toward de-massified, highly targeted, customized products that could reduce side effects and the additional costs they often impose. Cost-cutting reformers, in the meantime, seek just the opposite—mass-production health care in for form of standardized, cookie-cutter protocols, procedures and drugs. With costs and inefficiencies continuing to mushroom, the crisis in health economics cannot be resolved—until we look beyond industrial solutions to the extraordinary opportunities opened to us by the arrival of the knowledge economy and the new potentials for prosumer health care. Now, there is also a lot of contention when it comes to religion and celibacy. In 1970, the Jesuit magazine America predicted that by middecade, married priest would be a reality. Optimistic Dutch and Brazilian priests married. Optional celibacy, they believed, was almost certainly in the offing. How wrong intransigent Churchdom proved them! Not only did marriage remains strictly forbidden, but the Church subjected those requesting release from their vows to treatment many described as demeaning, even traumatizing. Virginity as a deliberately chosen vocation, based on a vow of chastity, and in combination with vows of poverty and obedience, creates particularly favorable conditions for the attainment of perfection in the New Testament sense.

However, some people believe that celibacy is the cause of priestly sinning in pleasures of the flesh, as a barrier to the religious vocations, and as a violation of human rights. This is to become a virginal kingdom of Heaven, as was the case with Mary. The virgin can become a wonderful channel of grace to the World, as was Mary. Because polygamy is becoming more common, clerical celibacy is an enormous obstacle to the recruitment of indigenous priests. It directly contradicts the traditional view that marriage is the focus of existence…a duty, a requirement from the corporate society, and a rhythm of life in which everyone must participate. One who does not is a cruse to the community, one is a rebel and a law-breaker, one is not only abnormal, but underhuman. It seems celibacy is neither understood nor respected. The temptation of the flesh is too strong for humans to resist. Many people believe that compulsory celibacy is going to eventually change, but what will that mean for society. Several think that the sexual revolution has gone too far, and would like to see some pillars in the community upholding the law of chastity. However, about 40 percent of U.S. priests are routinely uncelibate, a figure that excludes those whose lapses are infrequent. This is alarming and sparking worry that the sacraments dispensed by clergy who routinely desecrate their holy vows, will be inspiring in their congregations the notion that it is okay to be menu Catholics when something seems inconvenient or incompatible with their deepest beliefs, and that is perfectly acceptable. In fact, 84 percent of people in the United States of America would allow priests to marry. Indisputably, vast numbers of priests are either openly or clandestinely uncelibate, and in many countries large contingents are even married, either legally or de facto. Therefore, who prefers to operate within the Church’s defined spiritual parameters? Who prefers the public battle to clandestine defiance? Keep in mind, there are God’s representatives, but they do not have to be.