Narcissism in the New Age

In the Summer of 1969 I was 17. I hitch hiked, walked and drove, stuffed into a tiny rented car with my brother, a school chum and her Vietnam-vet boyfriend, through eight European countries. Also during that Summer 40 years ago Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon, “Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In” by the Fifth Dimension was number 1, “Easy Rider” hit the movie screens and 450,000 young music fans camped out on Max Yasgur's Bethel, New York farm for 3 days and nights of “peace and music.” I heard about the Woodstock Music and Art Fair at Yasgur's from my 19-year-old sister when I flew back across the Atlantic to Wisconsin at the end of August.

“It amazed everyone because so many people came, it was peaceful, no murders or fights, only some overdoses,” she gushed. I guess in that violent era – Vietnam, war protests, civil rights struggles – Americans expected a disorganized temporary “city” of 450,000 rebellious kids and hippies to cause a little, or a lot, of mayhem.

“Look what's possible!” I and thousands of others thought. And that became my mantra over the next decade. “Look what a wonderful world this would be,” in the words of the Sam Cooke song, if we could all be more open and honest with each other, more loving, less inhibited, more liberated and bursting with potential!

And I was going to help create the wonderful world. Me. I just knew, somehow, that I and my fellow “freaks,” and later, enlightenment-seekers, were onto something big. I knew we'd be guided. Damn, it felt good! Life was grand.

But mine was not the only perspective on 1969. That late August the editorial writers at the Wall Street Journal saw the whole unfolding show differently. Under the headline, “By Squalor Possessed,” they raged about the Woodstock attendees, “It would be a curious America if the unwashed, more or less permanently stoned on pot or LSD, were running very many things.
. . It will be at best a culturally poorer America and maybe a politically degenerated America . . . Their anarchic approach holds no hope at all.”

What’s more, “They won't listen,” laments the writer. But if the Woodstockers would, he says they should listen to Professor Lawrence Lee of the University of Pittsburgh when he told a fraternity audience, “You have been told, and you have come to believe, that you are the brightest of generations . . . You are, rather, one of the most self-centered, self-pitying, confused generations. . .”

Busted! Ouch. I don't know about confused and self-pitying, but I sure was self-centered and so, alas, narcissistic. Had you, Professor Lee, been part of the utopian social and spiritual movement I was part of I bet you too would have been narcissistic at ages 18 to 26 too. Anyway, narcissism had its benefits: a decade later I started a magazine with a grandiose vision to make the world better. I think it helped...maybe a little.

Anyway, Lee reveals his won narcissism when he says (quoted in the WSJ editorial) “We (in my generation) know more than you do from having lived longer, and we are so far ahead of you that it will take you a f***ing lifetime to have the same relative knowledge and wisdom.” (My italics, my expletive, for emphasis. Forgive me.)

After forty years of hindsight the Wall Street Journal again critiques my generation’s coming-out party on today’s opinion page (August 19, 2009). Thomas Frank writes, “We commemorate Woodstock as the symbolic moment when it began, when the youthful uprising against conformity and soullessness was supposedly pure and untainted. In truth, the counterculture critique was never all that shocking. The reason our advertising people and management theorists love it is because it was in many ways so utterly superficial.”

Oh really? Mr. Frank and Professor Lee both show us a pitfall of narcissism: they lack compassion and empathy. My experiences growing up, and my insights, certainly weren’t “utterly superficial,” at least not to me.

I love ridiculing Wall Street Journal writers! I think it makes me seem smart and sophisticated. And yet they too love ridiculing me and my cohorts, apparently. . .

A new New Age Today
I and a few other commentators (conservative and liberal) see narcissism lurking in new visions of certain people’s specialness, brilliance, and awesome potency. “I will personally heal the planet,” I hear them say. I don’t doubt that one person can do lots of good, but aren’t millions of other people doing similar good too? Isn’t “doing good” and “living sustainably” actually quite ordinary, therefore? How about you just recycle, grow a garden, and spread good cheer without puffing yourself up with self-congratulation and super-hero abilities?

My god, don’t I sound like Professor Lee and Mr. Frank now? What happened to the 1969-wonderful-world me? I guess I grew up. Oh dear. Now my realism is beating up my (and your, perhaps) idealism.

Narcissism, you gotta love it. See our article, “The royal me,” on page 20. Did you know that Chuck Norris did build Rome in a day? . . .