It never fails to crack me up how many anti-narcissist polemics are fundamentally grounded in narcissism.
"Unlike <author's group>, all these people are infatuated with their own..."
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My favourite pet peeve is the idea that narcissism is some kind of new and virulent illness.
We've been dealing with this particular problem since the paleolithic. It ain't new.
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Recent studies of rise in narcissism *can* be interesting (but are not as conclusive as people want them to be), I'll grant you that.
But comparing "modern" people with the distant past? Availability heuristic all the way down.
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The burden of proof is not satisfied with"oh, we have ads and social media and such, so people are more narcissistic because."
It's necessary to prove both that people are *really* narcissistic now and that this is a unique moment in history.
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When people have to resort to conjecture about people in the Distant Past, this shows it's mostly storytelling (on their part, anyway).
When this storytelling immediately feeds into "and that's why people should do this thing I do more so things will improve," that's narcissism.
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People are generally just pretty narcissistic. It's fairly unusual not to be at least a bit high on yourself.
It takes a pretty big leap to arrive from "typical meandering, self-absorbed human" to Donald Trump or the US media, though. And that's not *that* normal.
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