THE HELL WE MAKE
Ram Dass, the recovery model, and a radical road to de-radicalization
“I know many of you will feel uncomfortable when I say this, but the hippies create the police as much as the police create the hippies. The liberals create the conservatives. The protesters create the John Birchers just as much as the John Birchers create the protesters. As long as you are attached to whatever pole you are representing, the vibrations which you are sending out are creating its polar opposite around you.” —Ram Dass
I’m on my Ram Dass tip today. (It’s the 94th anniversary of the American guru’s birth). And my mind is full of models for how the universe ought to be.
And I imagine, dear reader, that yours is, too.
How’s that going for you this year?
Is the universe bending to your will?
I’m guessing no.
But that doesn’t seem to stop seemingly (almost) everyone from thinking it should.
Such is life in the era of collective narcissism 2.0.
Collective narcissism can be defined as “a tendency to exaggerate the positive image and importance of a group to which one belongs.” It adheres to “a belief that one’s own group (the ingroup) is exceptional and entitled to privileged treatment but it is not sufficiently recognized by others.”
As Ram Das says, “It’s the expectations of your own mind that are creating your hell. When you get frustrated because something isn’t the way you thought, examine those thoughts; not just the thing that frustrates you.”
But you can’t tell a collective narcissist that.
Because the touchstones of collective narcissism include hypersensitivity to criticism, siege mentality, conspiratorial thinking, and revengefulness.
Why waste your big, beautiful breath?
And it’s not like it’s a new thing. It was all the rage in the 1930s. And most of us know how that went down.
But, the 1930s didn’t have Mark Zuckerberg. Nor Zhang Yiming.
And the thing about collective narcissism is that it attracts those with low self-esteem and individual narcissistic tendencies, which the products that the aforementioned billionaires built both cultivate and prey upon.
Given that those products are designed to be addictive, it’s fair to say that, today, we live in a culture where people—and young people specifically—are addicted to their own low self-esteem. The self has become yet another vice from which corporate America (or the PRC) to profit. And its grievances require constant attention.
As Ram Dass put it, “you’re too busy holding onto your own unworthiness.” And gazing into it through a front-facing camera.
And this actually matters. Bigly.
Because, today, and throughout history, collective narcissism has some pretty nasty outcomes: prejudice toward minorities, intergroup hostility, and support for terrorism and violent extremism.
And when I look both ways, I see it on the right. And I see it on the left.
But where I don’t see it is in my recovery community.
Now, this is anecdotal. As a proud multi-factor source authenticator and Financial Times reader, I feel duty bound to caution you: beware the totally unsubstantiated claim of the self-published citizen journalist. But f*ck it, here goes: Addiction recovery inoculates sober kings and queens against the ills of collective narcissism.
For one, my collective—which IMHO is the most pluralistic, inclusive group that exists on the planet—isn’t worried about anyone else’s collective. We aren’t better. We just are. And we don’t need your attention. In fact, our whole thing has been designed to exist outside of it.
What happens in the church basements I kick it in is a lot of things, but it sure isn’t a front in the culture wars.
And while we adhere to a credo of “no opinions on outside issues,” I don’t think that’s it.
Nor do I think it’s following one of our many mantras, “get in the middle of the herd.” Although, that helps as a kind of self-orienting compass that diverts away from the fringes.
Fundamentally, it’s that we are actively managing our addictions by increasing our self-esteem, decreasing our self-deception, and developing our intellectual humility, “a positive humility that serves as antidote to destructive belittlement of self or others.”
Is anybody else?
Over the last couple of years, if I had a dollar for every time I thought, “Man, you would be embarrassed by your lack of intellectual humility were it not for your lack of intellectual humility,” I could, like, buy eggs.
In recovery, our humility keeps us sober. And sane.
As Dag Hammarskjöld, one-time UN Secretary General and Nobel Peace Prize winner put it, “Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self-exaltation. To be humble is not to make comparisons. Secure in its reality, the self is neither better nor worse, bigger nor smaller, than anything else in the universe. It is nothing, yet at the same time one with everything.”
Imagine a politician saying anything like that today.
Recovery also offers the gift of getting real. According to one study, 12-step recovery significantly decreased the presence of self-deception over a four-month period.
The addicted brain is accustomed to believing all kinds of bullsh*t to justify the continued using, the bad behavior, and the staggering self-involvement. There’s a rhythm to it, a well worn groove of delusion.
My life before sobriety had a hallucinatory quality to it.
And I’m not talking about coming home from my agency’s holiday party one year to find a 13th century samurai standing sentry in my bungalow’s entryway.
I’m talking about the phantasmagoric notion that I was a great employee at said company. Or a great boyfriend. Or an unredeemable piece of sh*t. The contrary delusions unhappily coexist.
And deception is dangerous. Full stop. As the American psychoanalyst, James Hollis, writes, “how much of our history has been drenched in blood by men who, unable to fight for their own truths, or indeed having none, projected their rage onto others and slaughtered them. All wars are civil wars—men against their brothers.”
Sociocultural studies have found that those pulled to the extremes experience the same sh*t those who get too deep into the booze and drugs do: Obsession. Losing friends. Paranoia. Spending more time on the chasing, and the getting, and the doing than they had ever intended.
When scientists look at the brain of the addict and the brain of the extremist, they see the same neural pathways.
And when researchers in Switzerland looked at “social justice activists,” they found the same heightened levels of narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism (a.k.a. the dark triad personality traits) as they find in right-wing extremists.
Don’t kill the messenger.
Just remember that what you really can’t tolerate when you look at, say, Donald Trump or A.O.C., is your own reflection in a perceived reality (or delusion) that you co-create with them.
And that’s what most of us refuse to look at. Or are too afraid to.
As Ram Dass states, “What you meet in another being is the projection of your own level of evolution.”
And from a grand Buddhist perspective, perhaps we’re just a plane of young souls, none younger than the current occupants of the Oval or the masked, sloganeering protestors in the streets and on the socials.
Both of their self-indulgent, apoplectic responses to f*cking everything are so tired. I would say, “get over it.” But I would be misspeaking.
It’s more like, “Get over your Self.”
That’s where the real work is. And that’s what we do in recovery. We “live and let live.” And if everybody else did, I guarantee the world we live in would have way less things to be apoplectic about. Our gift of desperation has a side effect. The gift of levitation. The ability to rise above all the f*cks given to heal ourselves and, in turn, do our infinitesimally small part to heal one another and the world.
Ours isn’t just a path to happy destiny. It’s a road to de-radicalization. And I pray everybody else puts down their phones and gets on the VW bus. Before it’s too late. If it isn’t already.