The Crisis of Self-Esteem

A few weeks ago, a flurry of end-of-year reviews hailed 2022 as the year “We All Finally Got Tired of Narcissists,” as Joanna Weiss proclaimed in Politico.

Over the past decade or so, a mix of shameless self-aggrandizement and self-confident charm has served certain people extraordinarily well, turning them into venture-capital darlings, licensed-merchandise magnates, Forbes cover models, social media superstars, Oprah confessors, business-conference keynoters, new-money plutocrats and, in one case, president. Elon Musk, Sam Bankman-Fried, Ye (né Kanye West), Elizabeth Holmes, Meghan Markle, Donald Trump: All of them used attention as currency and ego as fuel, and were rewarded, for a time, with what they craved. We’re drawn to people who love themselves.

Weiss probably got the most attention because she included in her list the attention-seeking Duchess of Sussex, thus getting swept into the maelstrom of the Great Harry and Meghan Culture War. But other articles sounded similar themes with many other examples.

I don’t think the compulsive attention-seeker is anything new. We will always hear a lot about these people because they do whatever it takes to make sure we hear about them. But it certainly seems as if many of these characters have come crashing down to earth recently, exposing the gap between their delusions of grandeur and reality.

Yet what really caught my attention was the crucial error in the common interpretation of this phenomenon. Do these compulsive attention-seekers actually “love themselves”? Because it seems obvious to me that their whole problem is that they don’t.

We are experiencing a crisis of self-esteem, all right, and part of the crisis is that people can’t tell the difference between too much self-esteem and too little.

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Echoes of Narcissus

I am not a psychiatrist, and if I were, I wouldn’t violate the Goldwater Rule and start trying to diagnose public figures from a distance. Yet whether or not they meet the clinical criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder, there are plenty of examples of narcissism in the ordinary public understanding of the word.