Beware pandemic of narcissism’s insidious spread

Symptoms include selfish entitlement, mistrust of authority, scorn towards experts and a belligerent rejection of responsibility.

Protesters in a stand-off with police at Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance this week. Picture: Jason Edwards

Early this week, as a mob in Melbourne barricaded union officials in their own office, many employers would have been thinking: now you know how it feels.

It was heartening shortly after to see unions condemn the violence. However, in the construction industry, illegal blockades by persons unknown, in union apparel, do occur and when this happens other unions are silent.

The behaviour we have seen this week though is not just about unions, angry workers and the loss of pay for two weeks. It is not just about Covid-19 and vaccinations as a requirement for certain types of employment.

It is not about whether protesters are left-wing unionists or right-wing anti-vaxxers; people can hold complicated and contrary political views, and they are not categorised easily.

What we saw this week is the pandemic of narcissism spreading. This pandemic originated in the US and it is spreading into our country through the internet and the 24-hour news cycle. Witness the ascendance of an unreasonable cohort in our hyper-connected, modern democracy.

Symptoms include a mindset of selfish entitlement, mistrust of authority, scorn towards experts, a belligerent rejection of responsibility, angry insistence on the individual right to do anything at all, regardless of the impact on others, and disdain for social cohesion.

This is not an uprising by the poorly treated and marginalised. It is a rush to tear down civilised society and create mayhem by those who have fallen captive to the instant and addictive gratification delivered by hits, likes and followers on internet platforms.

At the Shrine of Remembrance, people aped for the cameras an Australian version of the US Capitol moment. Melbourne’s Parliament House had been secured; they couldn’t burst inside and ransack it in a live-streamed takeover. So they sat on the shrine as the next best thing.

In Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from within on Modern Democracy, American author Tom Nichols chronicles the emergence of the narcissism pandemic and explains how our technological connectedness enables it.

Nichols describes the early days of Donald Trump’s election loss, when the first adherents of QAnon cultists were seen seated in the US House of Representatives. He references attempts by US politicians to walk on to the floor of the house carrying weapons and describes these as not “merely oddball moments” but “signs of a growing irrational and illiberal self-indulgence among an increasing number of voters and their elected representatives”.

In the past week I have seen two Queensland politicians give encouragement to our protesters, outright or by subtle means with messages of empathy. Last year, in our long lockdown, I saw selfie videos taken by rule breakers played on television, where their actions were given validation by commentators.

After the US Capitol was stormed in January, a detailed analysis by the University of Chicago found that arrestees had an average age of 40, and 40 per cent were business owners or white-collar job holders. Only 9 per cent were unemployed.

Nichols says the insurrectionists came to Washington after “years of gorging on internet conspiracies and simple-minded memes” and “after so much time experiencing political life through a screen” were “weirdly disconnected from the gravity of their actions”. They “stormed the seat of government while staring at themselves on their phones and frantically posting updates” to their social media.

This week we saw similar actions in Victoria, but these moments can be seen across the country. We saw them in Perth and in Brisbane, neither of which were in lockdown at the time.

Melbourne, though, for this cohort, is the jewel in the crown. It offers the most reward for effort. This is because of heavy media focus on our state. Relentless criticism engenders contempt and creates a permissive environment where such behaviour can take place. Focus and heightened coverage of the protests confirms the prevailing narrative, provides the reward of attention to activists, increases the criticism and contempt, and around the cycle goes.

Consider this: at time of writing, TV channels are taking our authorities to court for the right to fly over the protests and capture live coverage to broadcast.

Police don’t want the coverage to occur live, they want a one-hour delay. This is because the protesters have been streaming the live coverage on to their phones, seeing where the police are and evading them. This reasonable position on the part of police isn’t good enough for the TV channels, though. They want to broadcast the footage live. The footage gains eyeballs on the news, then commentators can use it to pile on, pillory police for not doing their job well enough, denounce our state as failed, whip people up to tear the place down, and around it goes.

As Nichols says, when a political environment “sinks into a corrosive slurry” it “eats away at the foundations of democracy”. In such conditions “even a great people will be unable to handle the trials that inevitably befall every nation, including (as we see now) a pandemic”. Such challenges require “sacrifice, stoicism, and civic commitment”. The US has demonstrated an inability to deal with adversity. We need to be different.