I Don't Want to *Talk* About It 1/2: Fragile Egocentrism

Disclaimer:

So relatively speaking, I've been on a tear on this blog, my most active since like the first I don't know, 7 years of blogging. There were periods of my life where I posted like once a day, I'd say the average dropped to like once a month and the accumulation of unfinished drafts...

Anyway, 'nobody likes a meta-blog' or something to that effect from nemesis John is ringing in my ears, but in my recent exuberance I may have assumed a kind of familiarity that doesn't exist or isn't earned and have been neglecting to properly flag or disclaim my own mental short-hands for concepts I'm grappling with.

Suchly, this post is no exception (nor are their exceptions) that I am some guy in terms of qualifications, and I am most often making shit up with no soundness, validity or rigour. Please keep that in mind, I mean sound and valid concepts like 'bullying' 'gaslighting' and 'narcissism' as determined through processes like research and field testing often get diluted and skunked anyway, and I don't anticipate any of my neologisms taking off, but I just wouldn't want it to start with me, writing confidently and impressing upon someone that I grasp something, when the reality is that I am only ever grasping often desperately for a hypothesis to go out and test myself, or that fits the facts of only the very narrow window of my experience.

Onto the meat.

Darwin's Gifted Children

I like Dr. Todd Grande's breakdowns of, most often, true crime cases that involve some psychological dysfunction on multiple parties accounts. This morning on my way to the shops I listened to a particularly grisly case involving the conviction of murder for a 9 year old child. I'm not going to link here, it is pretty bleak.

Its also the extreme example of how helpless we are as a species, even a society. The low hanging fruit of clinical psychology practitioners is to ask about a patient's parents and early childhood experiences. This in turn is a kind of social occupation that exists in a process whereby we allow eggs to fall off a shoot and regularly crack, then we have a job that slaps a band-aid on the cracks.

What I'm getting at, is basically it is unworkable to create something like a parenting-license, where humans are prohibited from having children until they can demonstrate a level of competence. Biology works against us as do our moral intuitions, I believe rightly, that don't want a state that dictates who can have children and when and how many and who with.

We also have access to this counterfactual in the very civilization and societies we live in that show that the impact of inept and incompetent parenting is not an existential threat to society. 

Here then, is not the brilliance of parents, (well maybe some), but the brilliance of children.

This is really the thesis of evergreen book "The Drama of the Gifted Child" that predates "gifted" as it is employed today to describe academic potential. The gift in this context is the way a child can adapt to the circumstances of its family, a process that produces drama in response to drama, a performative empty adult that has survived childhood by becoming who they need to be to survive their own parents, rather than become themselves.

As such, the book skews heavily to the gift of appeasement - a child recognises the conditional nature of their parents love, and the corresponding conditional nature of parental anxiety, and appeases the parents they rely on by becoming who their parents are comfortable with them being. Basic behaviorism or reinforcement.

But (and my memory is not good enough to recall if this is a specific example) there may be another response particularly for children whose parents neglect them that isn't appeasement (or self-neglect to go along with parental needs and thus get rewarded) and that is to become ego-centric, or simply adapt to neglectful (and perhaps even hostile) parenting by becoming parent to themselves.

This is what I'm positing, I'm speculating as a kind of fragile egocentrism. A brilliant, amazing, intuitive response a child can adapt in order to survive their childhood - physically, nutritionally, psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, financially etc. any combination of those.

What I am picturing is a child who learns they cannot rely on their parents to fulfill their needs. They have to advocate for themselves, they have to "lean in" and hustle and grind. They have to hunt and gather resources.

This is a fucking amazing thing our biology is capable of. The kid that walks themselves to the library and entertains themselves on a rainy day afternoon. The kid that aportions to themselves a disproportion of teacher's attention because they need it like the other students don't.

It is also, hopefully obviously, a very tragic brilliant thing that we can do. There is a degree of moral-hazard in having this risk-smoothing biology that allows bad couplings to produce beautiful children. It means that what is naturally selected is gifted children, likely because for most of human history there just was no such thing as birth control, and what isn't selected for extinction is attachment theory where we gravitate toward partners who will replicate familiar suffering. That is where IMO we are stupidly, rather than brilliantly adapted.

What Got You Here Won't Get You There

This is the name of another book, I have it sitting around somewhere but not within my eyeline so I can't read the author and I've already expended as much energy typing this as the google search would have taken.

It's almost in that category of books you don't have to read because it is all in the title self-help like "feel the fear and do it anyway" and "He's Just Not that Into You" but not quite, you probably can get 90% of the value from a blurb so here's mine:

The book is about the diminishing returns of our innate strengths, and the Peter Principle which states that everyone will be promoted to their level of incompetence which has been robustly tested and is generally regarded to be real. Your career will stall when the thing that "got you here" begins to work against you preventing you from getting any further it won't "get you there."

So if your career has been based on speaking confidently and commanding attention, eventually you will rise to a level of responsibility where you need to become cautious, conscientious because the stakes are too high to just take big swing after big swing for example. Or if you've risen through the ranks because you produce high quality work thanks to your attention to detail and work ethic, you will eventually be promoted to a role where to scale up your strengths you need to become sociable, patient, understanding.

Okay so that's basically the book, and it has some advice and things you can do to get over this hump in a career, but the first step is to acknowledge the problem.

What I would guess is not unique to the child who has to remain egocentric to survive childhood and their family of origin, is that not just in work but all applications this begins to work against them in adulthood. 

The simple reason being, not everyone is their parents. Now if we take a longer term view of history, going back to the majority of human civilization which is like 6,000 years, so 10 seconds to midnight compared to human history, but when your parents were dirt farmers, and gave birth to you and your sixteen siblings, nine of whom died by age two, you grew up to be a dirt farmer working on your family plot so whatever adaptation you made to survive childhood among your extended family (nuclear families are a very recent thing) it probably largely applied to your adulthood too. So if you needed to be an egocentric child to glom onto a competent aunt or uncle and get some much needed resources off them where your parents came up short, likely nothing much changed by the time you were thirty and the previous generation were 43. 

Hence, its probably not natural to proactively reconfigure in the complex economy we now live in, where people hit 22, have largely not become parents themselves and are moving to a share house for the final 5 of 7 magical years it takes to complete a three year degree before your first warehouse job and moving back in with your parents. (Also very recent, it used to be possible to become an adult by 21 for most people within living memory)

Bringing me to the thing I'd rather shout into forgotten but not defunct web 1.0 than talk about with the people most effected by it - fragile egocentrism.

Why not "Vulnerable Narcissism"?

Because, despite their being a 'healthy narcissism' present in most functioning adults, an ability to see themselves as something of unique value and seek validation by asking for things, applying for things, generally advocating for themselves so they don't just wither and die in endless reflection about their own insignificance - Narcissism is a thing, and specifically that thing is a personality disorder so it has a highly negative valence - basically we think of villany, of abusers etc. these are the images evoked for me at least, when someone uses 'narcissism' 

Secondly, I'm in no position to diagnose or misdiagnose anyone with narcissism. It may well be that what I am talking about is completely overlapping with 'vulnerable narcissism' but I have no expertise with which I could determine that. 

So I want to break down specifically what I don't want to literally talk about:

Egocentrism

Here's how I usually explain it: say you want a romantic partner, or you want to fill a job position. So you create in essence an ad to say I'm available.

The challenge we face, that force us to think or suffer, is that people will swipe-to-match our dating profile that would make good partners, but also people who will make terrible partners. Both broad groups of people "want" to have a relationship with us, but one will punish us in fulfilling their wants, whereas the other will reward us in fulfilling their wants.

The one that punishes us, I assert, will likely be highly egocentric. They want to be seen with us, they want our attention, they want our validation, they want to fuck us. To be lowly egocentric, they will want to connect with us, they will want to learn us, they will want us to enjoy sex with them as they would enjoy sex with us. They want a reciprocal give-take win-win relationship where ideally the line between giving and receiving will be blurred.

Same-same with filling a job opening, you will have applicants that simply want the job because of the benefits it can accrue to themselves, they want the income, they want the title, they want access to a social life, they want to dispose the income on goods and services they also want...but they may have very little interest in doing the actual role and will make for a terrible employee. But there will be other candidates who may want all of the above, but also to do the role, to produce a good or service, to take pride in the work and form a mutually beneficial employment arrangement.

Again I am going to assert, that if investigated a reliable predictor of good and bad job applicants will be the level of their egocentricity.

Now again with John's words echoing in my mind "meta-blogging...meta-blogging...meta-blogging..." take this very post for example - I am thinking about my audience, choosing this medium because it is active, rather than passive, a party that might benefit has to read on and can quit at any time, it's also impersonal I'm not confronting someone with "I think what is holding you back is your egocentricity" I leave that self-evaluation up to the reader, whereas an egocentric approach to this subject would be to not only confront someone with my impression of them, but to do so because their egocentricity bothers me and me alone. 

I don't believe in purely selfless acts, I wouldn't go that far. I just actually see it as win-win if I can give someone a piece of information that can in someway, lessen their suffering and in doing so, my own is.

What I would wish to make painfully clear is that I don't feel it necessary, warranted or constructive to attribute malice to this egocentricity. I am trying to point to an incompetence, the same as having salad in one's teeth, a procedural step is often missing that others possess to the level of an unconscious-competence or 'instinct' or 'intuition' and I believe can be built by anyone with practice.

This brings me to...

Fragility

A vending machine technician is servicing a machine. A resident of the building is telling the technician her opinion of the policy that the machines do not issue change. 

This is a banal egocentric exchange. The complainer is just demonstrating an incompetence of insight - what I call outsight. Their opinion is very much egocentric - sometimes they don't have exact change, its a hassle for them. They either have to buy more than they want or go without, or go to extra effort to break notes into exact change. These are legitimate grievences based on legitimate preferences, but the technician occupies a position where she can politely write it up for the person, but very probably little else. They are not in a position to change the policy, nor may they understand the policy by which to offer explanation and apology to the complaining consumer. 

They likely have no clout.

Now this example I have adapted from a real world scenario, where the complainer also has the first-hand experience of doing cold calling on behalf of the government. A not uncommon scenario for them to face at work, was to have a member of the public relay a message for the then prime-minister. 

Here then enters the fragility. This person had a personal experience with which they could relate to a vending machine vendor. The idea that the leader of the government of a nation had an office in the corner of a call center, where we could go tap on their door and say "some guy asked me to tell you Prime Minister, that he thinks you're a cunt and not to call at dinner time and he isn't going to vote for you because you fucked up the whole country by letting all those immigrants in."

Then I feel, to de-centralise our ego from this experience and generalise it to a fellow human being and be like "oh yeah, as if the technician can walk into the board meeting and say 'some lady thinks your vending machines should be stocked with ample change because it would be more convenient for her and I guess we can just absorb the additional logistical expense, security expense and incidences of vandalism to deliver that level of convenience.' how foolish of me, that's so annoying, just like when random members of the public tell me to tell the Prime Minister or latest minister to appear in the papers with an expense scandal something."

Right it should be an "uh huh" moment, and not an existential threat, which is how I've had others report the effect of any mention of their egocentricity come across. Perhaps one of the most publicly documented examples is in the 2002 documentary "Comedian" (spoiler, the documentaries climax is Jerry Seinfeld meeting with Bill Cosby) the doco follows two comedians, one being Jerry as he retires his material and painstakingly builds up a new set, you know, you remember his new stuff. The other is Orny Adams, who is an up-and-coming comedy prospect. Orny appears in several scenes, notably an appearance in from memory, Toronto, where on stage he reacts (in 2002 Youtube was barely a thing, let alone "reaction" video content) to a bad review of his act in the Toronto Star.

Afterwards, a veteran comedian, I can't recall who, gives Orny the blunt feedback that basically he needs to stop being fixated on himself and make the audience laugh. This exchange upsets Orny, but gives his agent/manager sufficient courage to take a break from enabling Orny and says something like "I don't disagree with anything he said." 

Another go to example for me, is Derren Brown's breakdown of a scene from 'L'illusionist' a 2010 animated feature:

"Magicians I think [need to] make the performance about something else other than just 'look how clever I am look, look at what I can do' which is the mistake this otherwise technically brilliant magician is making in this and the reason why his audience is so small and why the kid is just only interested in how the tricks done because ultimately then that's that's all that's left isn't there"

Like when I consider how fucking valuable this feedback is, it can literally 180 the direction of someone's life from unmitigated disaster to realised self-worth, it is devastating to encounter this brilliant gifted child who in part or wholly raised themselves gatekeeping the adult's ability to function as a free human in society. 

This is the fragility and it's a death-spiral to couple fragility with egocentricity. 

Why I don't want to literally talk about it

In brief: incompetence and impotency. Like I have tried to talk about it in the past, and it came very close to just blowing up a friendship.

There's a saying that doesn't apply here: "If this is what it feels like to be wrong, I don't want to be right."

From my perspective, limited though it is, what it feels like to be egocentric as an adult, is mostly bad. These people are suffering. 

But what it feels like to be right, is in this case incredibly scary. 

So the above saying doesn't work, because this is something you say with a nose full of cocaine and a prostitute wearing your wife's old high-school uniform while she is in a clinic having her post-partum depression treated. It's not like it's actually ever wise to be wrong, but there's a hedonic payoff in the moment that makes the saying cogent, if fundamentally false.

I would guess, as a lay person with no capacity to know that having unreliable parents is the kind of existential threat that can justify a classification of trauma. In this way perhaps there's some aptitude to identify thinking of others, perspective taking etc. as an existential threat, causing stress, post-trauma; and that it is disordered basically once one becomes legally and financially independent from parents or primary carers.

There may also be an aptitude in phenomena like "scarcity cultures" Melbourne youtuber klaize has a video on the theory behind the "greedy Chinese" stereotype which cites a bunch of memes like Chinese appearing people loading up on single use plastic bags in produce sections of grocery stores for example. He cites research using economic games with children that from memory suggests a kind of intergenerational trauma arising from the famines caused in China by Mao's reckless and irresponsible social experiments that characterised his control of the People's Republic of China. 

Now, to suggest that the infants are experiencing trauma I suspect might be a stretch, though as adults they may develop anxieties learning oral histories, but it seems a culture can also, I'm going to say 'collapse' into egocentricity - a 'fuck you I got mine' arising from actual, or anticipated scarcity (as is likely happening now that every moron is parroting predictions of 50% unemployment in the future and then acting like it isn't completely fucking insane that anyone is enthusiastically charging toward such a destabilisation of human civilization. This is also, simply in addition to all the fucking news coverage for 10-15 years about housing becoming unaffordable, and young people not being able to ever own their own home, and at the same time, journalists on the public broadcaster basically masturbating on live TV over the prospect of rate cuts from the central bank pushing property prices ever closer to the moon.)

I don't want to talk about it, because there's a fundamental difficulty in discussing it intelligibly, let alone intelligently. 

I binge watched House M.D. one time, finding its formulaic episodes following A, B and C plots on the same predictable beats episode after episode, season after season. For those who no longer recall House, or terrestrial television, Dr. House worked in the diagnostics department of Princeton Teaching Hospital in New Jersey, his job was to figure out combinations of weird symptoms and patients resistant to treatment that defied the run-of-the-mill presentations.

A guiding principle for the diagnostics, is that you are always going for one condition to explain all the symptoms. So like if someone presents with yellowed skin, abdominal pain and an ear ache, you don't want to explain all those symptoms with three conditions if there's one that can explain all of them. So I don't have the medical knowledge to come up with a valid example, but let's say "Dave's syndrome" explains all three and is treated with massage, that's better than "jaundice, appendicitis and ear infection."

But this is what I've found, so let me try and noodle it a bit here - egocentricity is an adaptive response to early childhood adversity, the parents, guardians, carers aren't doing their bit so the child steps up; that becomes maladaptive in adulthood where (dysfunctional economy aside) your peers are expected to rely on each other, not their parents. So that's (1) and this egocentricity co-exists with a background level of existential dread, like being cutoff or something so (2) is that someone who is egocentric also doesn't like to hear, let alone be told they are 'egocentric.'

Which means (3) that we can't talk intelligently about this perfectly reasonable, in many ways admirable response to childhood adversity because to acknowledge it is somehow to send someone back there.

My greater problem

Is not only do I not want to literally talk about it anymore, with anyone, I don't want to watch it. I don't want to see it. I don't want to be around when it happens.

It's painful to watch someone say "buy this thing about me" with, and that is a crucial "with", no consideration as to why anyone else should but that thing, and that thing about you, and what they get out of it in return for what me gets out of it.

It's this awful thing where I cannot resolve the pain of caring about someone with fragile egocentricity, so I wind up having to avoid them so I don't have to exist in that place where a dysfunctional adult hurts themselves, and I feel bad for them.