The Inevitability of Narcissism

The Inevitability of Narcissism

Mohit Damle

The life of a hermit appears to me as gold,
I shall become one once I am old,
Once all my loved ones and many a friend,
Have either lost themselves or declared themselves dead.
Up in the mountains I shall lay,
Freezing to grey,
From night to day,
Drifting away,
Becoming the light of day.

One acts in order to experience a desired state of being. To be alive is a basic desirable state for everyone. The desire to maintain one’s own life is the desire to be self-aware. Being physically alive is the basic definition of being self aware. The affinity toward other living things serves the same purpose, as does the act of raising offspring. These acts lead to self-preservation; to preserve one’s own being is to be aware of one’s own being, an awareness that is reflected by one’s own thoughts and by the preservation of others with whom one identifies with.

This is what would have driven the first intelligent organisms to learn certain basic skills such as that of nutrition to achieve the state of self-preservation. As long as this was the desired state of being, the organisms would be limited to being in the possession of the bits and pieces of information that maintain the said state. However, the environment of such organisms was subject to change and the nature of the processes that led to their ‘self-preservation’ changed accordingly. This caused the organisms to learn new skills to maintain the same state. This added to the knowledge, defining the minds of these organisms capable of passing on complex information to others. These organisms, with their desired goal being that of self-preservation, would have no incentive to understand the futility of retaining skills that helped only their cause in the previous environment. On the contrary, they’d have the incentive to retain those defunct skills because those skills would still serve the purpose of being reflections of the self. Tradition can be seen as something that is born from sentimentality. This, in accordance with further changes in environment would go on to shape this organism in such a way that it would learn to use other things to satisfy its craving for self awareness (with an increase in intelligence), or it may supposedly regress to dependence on a fewer number of actions and objects to maintain its sense of self (a decrease in intelligence).

A linear pattern in evolution can be seen as the movement towards higher self-awareness, a movement that gives rise to the qualities of intelligence, social structure, parenthood, cultural tradition etc.

The human being is one that has moved in the evolutionary direction that we like to label as progressive. The human being seeks more than just the processes of nutrition, parenthood and community to be self-aware; the human being has reached a critical point of where it scrambles to expand the list of things that remind it of itself. The human being craves a state of awareness that is more direct and accurate than the current state. This is evident in the long standing human tradition of intellectual inquiry. The desire to know just for the sake of knowing is the desire to reach a point of a superior self-awareness. Different humans move towards this with varying degrees of desire. Most simply don’t care; they are happy with the self assurance they receive from their family, community, favourite sports, material possessions and strong beliefs embedded in a ‘Black and White’ school of thought. Others most evidently wish to expand, however, only by a certain degree. They follow through with intellectual and creative pursuits; they are the thinkers and artists.

The last category of humans is one of those who wish to attain a state of absolute self awareness. They wish to wield sovereignty over all that is conceivable. They believe that in order to expand their limited state of awareness to a state of perfect awareness, they must free themselves from the limits of the individual ego. They choose to abstain from attachment; from the type of attachment that makes one form new bonds to the type of attachment that makes one sever old bonds. They wish to prevent themselves from existing in relation to anyone or anything and this includes existence in relation to themselves. They decide to take up hermit lifestyles in order to help them do this. These people are the Sadhus, the hermits, passively receding and growing towards a state of perfection.

Let us assume that these people are successful. Is it possible for us to confirm if they can be successful in reaching their goal? One gains knowledge in order to derive a solution to a problem. We can confirm the successfulness of the person in solving the problem by checking if the result of the person’s attempt resembles the solution that we can conceptualize. However, when the problem is that of limited awareness with its solution being defined as the movement into a state of unlimited awareness, there is no way for limited beings like us to confirm such things. This is because one who exists as all of reality would be perceived by us as just that- all of reality. We would perceive the construct consisting of the entirety of reality and that neighbour who suddenly left his family to go live up in the mountains as a hermit as two separate things. To us, reality is reality and that neighbour is a lunatic who has caused his family much distress and has probably been dead in the mountains for the last two months.

Hence either opinion is equally acceptable; humans looking to reach the heavens could either be the rightful heirs to the thrown that overlooks all of reality, or be the ultimate slaves to the chains of insecurity.