The End of Narcissism, Extremism, & Disruption
In his essay in this morning’s New York Times, Frank Bruni quotes Representative Veronica Escobar (D-TX), “‘I feel like I’m on a roller-coaster ride, running between hopeful and hopeless.’” This was right before The Supremes tossed the Texan attorney-general’s case about the election.
Yes, Veronica, there is a rollercoaster. We’ve all been clinging to it, and it’s time to call that rollercoaster what it really is, and get off it once and for all.
The business-speak word for that nightmare amusement park ride is … disrupter. Those who are given that label pride themselves on it. Often, they resign themselves to it, as though they are somehow victimized by being disrupters. Once, I knew a disrupter very well. He came close to upending my entire life.
Thomas L. Friedman writes in his essay on the possibility of the founding of a new, principled conservative party, “[O]ne thing I learned covering the Middle East is that there is only one reliable thing about extremists—they don’t know when to stop. So, in the end, they almost always go over the cliff, taking a lot of people with them.”
Disrupters are extremists, almost always. Mr. Friedman asserts that “extremists can’t stop.” He’s right even when a disrupter appears to be doing a principled thing. Like this:
“WASHINGTON—President Trump on Tuesday evening threatened to derail months of bipartisan work in Congress to deliver $900 billion in coronavirus relief to a country battered by the pandemic, demanding checks to Americans that are more than three times as much as those in the bill, which he called a ‘disgrace.’ … ‘I am asking Congress to amend this bill and increase the ridiculously low $600 to $2,000,’ he added.”
My heart stuttered this morning when I read that. The Narcissist-in-Chief is doing something for the American people? Something right? What?!?!?!
Joe Jordan from Butner, NC wrote in his Letter to the Editor Re “This Deal Is Good Enough” (editorial, Dec. 21): “To be sure, it’s good news that after eight months of haggling, Congress has finally agreed on another economic relief package with a second round of payments to help Americans struggling to make ends meet during the pandemic. But it’s deplorable that it took so long to do so while people across America have been losing their jobs, and that the amount of the so-called stimulus check will be only $600.
“That’s just a little more than members of Congress make in a day. And it’s wholly inadequate.”
Like everyone else, I felt the easing of tension once both houses of Congress came to an agreement and did their duty to pass the bill. Then came the Disrupter-in-Chief. Upon reflection, I realized his “disgrace” statement, whilst true, isn’t about doing something for the American people at all. It’s about keeping the focus on him.
You see, one of the little-spoken but tacitly acknowledged truths about Disrupters is that they are all narcissists. What they want most is to keep the focus on themselves which they do by keeping everyone else off-kilter. Oddly, it’s a form of rigid control—uh, making sure things are out of control. There’s whiplash in that there sentence, Beloved.
Frank Bruni is having a hard time holding on to his hope for the decency tenor of the Biden-Harris agenda. He writes, “In the many weeks since it became clear that he lost the election, Donald Trump has successfully marketed an outrageous alternate reality, so that 70 percent of registered Republican voters, according to a Quinnipiac poll this month, believe that Biden’s victory was illegitimate. Trump has taken his refusal to concede to historic, previously unthinkable lengths. And an overwhelming majority of Republican members of Congress have played along, actively or passively, many of them knowing better, all of them traitors to democracy and profiles in cowardice.”
But unmistakable indicators of the off-kilter reality espoused by the Disrupter-in-Chief, who also masquerades as the Narcissist-in-Chief, who also—I have run out of deplorable-in-Chiefs—rage across the country.
Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) appears to be one of the few federal officials who is asking the right questions. “‘What is Trump going to do?’ he wondered aloud. ‘Will he get tired of the prospect of being on TV every day and battling? I don’t think so. Will people move on or will they continue to want to be entertained by a particularly skilled showman?”
Disrupters are worse than showmen, Beloved. They’re showboats, a term I learned in the context of a Bad News Bears-level high school girls’ basketball team. A showboat is someone who won’t ever pass the ball to anyone else. Why? Because that means the showboat is no longer granted all the attention.
In a frightening article on how, since the onset of the coronavirus, feminism has failed women, Kim Brooks writes, “Pandemics make visible what’s been hidden; they illuminate the connections between us, the dependencies we’d rather not acknowledge.”
Here’s a usually-invisible truth writ large: Every one of us has an Inner Narcissist. This is one of the reasons so many of our good citizens voted for the man who is about to go kicking and screaming out of The White House. He gets away with his narcissistic acts. Few of the rest of us do, Beloved. Or, we might, in the short-term, but not in the long-term. Our connections and dependencies put a stop to it.
All narcissists are disrupters. All. They universally disrupt anything that doesn’t place the attention squarely on themselves. One of the ironic blessings of the pandemic has been, to quote Stephanie Foo’s lovely article on spending Christmas alone, “But with the right mind-set and a little creativity, a lonely Christmas can be about more than survival. It can be an opportunity to learn to thrive in your aloneness. Of course, this is a challenge many encountered this year—learning to nurture and entertain ourselves, to break the boredom and monotony. But Christmas is an extravagant holiday, full of dramatic acts of celebration—so why not take the chance to lavish them on ourselves?”
This lavishing that she suggests, Beloved, is not narcissism, not by a long shot. Consider the real narcissists you know. They all, without exception, need a context to disrupt, don’t they? Alone, truly alone, their narcissism—thanks be to God—stands a chance of dying its own painful, long overdue, operatic death.
Despite the death throes of the political narcissists that pepper our collective landscape, Beloved, I have to back these optimistic words of President-Elect Joe Biden, “I may eat these words, but I predict to you: As Donald Trump’s shadow fades away, you’re going to see an awful lot change.”
Here’s a small foreshadowing of just such a change. Congress approved the establishment of both National Latino and National Women’s History Museums. “One of the lead sponsors of the effort to create a women’s museum, U.S. Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, said Monday, ‘For too long, women’s stories have been left out of the telling of our nation’s history, but with this vote, we begin to rectify that.’” I was a proud founding member of the NWHM.
Ms. Foo again, “For me, the secret to spending the holidays [or the pandemic, my addition] alone was to recognize that I wasn’t really alone. I had myself. Which might not seem like much, if you’re going to be the guest who complains about the food and works the whole time. But if you invite the bravest, kindest, most fun version of yourself to your party, you might wind up falling in love with your weird and wonderful self.”
To fall in love with your weird, wonderful self, Beloved, is to withdraw your attention from what you don’t have, what isn’t there, what you might miss, and instead focus on what you do have, what is there, and what you might discover. Do that, and your attention will automatically be on you and off the disrupters, off the extremists, off the narcissists that have been keeping us off-kilter for so very long. Neglect, especially cold turkey neglect, ends the reign of a narcissist, and what a welcome relief that will be.
And then, not only will President Biden be empowered to move forward, so will we.
Dr. Susan Corso is a spiritual teacher, the founder of iAmpersand, and the author of The Mex Mysteries, the Boots & Boas Books, and spiritual nonfiction. Her essays address the intersection of spirituality and culture. Her website is susancorso.com.