The Red House on Mississippi: Narcissism and irony under capitalism
By: Michael Zemel
Tags: Narcissism, Gentrification, Psychology, Capitalism, Marx

Controversy acts like a sieve.

Only a small percentage of overall protestors are left defending the RHAZ — we might ask: what is special about this subset in particular? As it turns out, these are the most narcissistic of all the protestors.

Narcissism, to me, is the willingness to challenge orthodoxy (and accept pain) as a means of self-expression.

For these protestors, it is more important that they express themselves as revolutionaries than it is to follow the new orthodoxy, one which would make defending William X. Nietzche difficult. They continue to defend him, against intuition, even though it turns them into pariahs.

This is a fairly common practice: people will often tolerate pain because it communicates something about how they imagine themselves — for example, a “starving artist.”

In addition to the pain of challenging orthodoxy, everyone under capitalism experiences a daily pain known as alienation.

Alienation under capitalism is when workers feel disconnected from their final product, or when they feel emotionally detached from the problematic actions of their company (example: Amazon). Since no one feels directly responsible, the company’s momentum is harder to stop. The workers know they are part of the problem but feel powerless to do anything about it. Each worker knows that this irony should bother him more than it actually does, making him feel alienated because his intentions and actions do not match up, making him lose self-confidence.

Capitalism offers an alienated reality, known as “the Spectacle”, in lieu of actual reality. We can just barely detect that something is amiss, that our experience is unintuitive, creating a pervasive feeling of alienation: that this is not our home, that something better exists, that we are being sold something.

In order for narcissists to tolerate this alienation, every so often they must explode with self-expression. The narcissist’s need for self-expression, this cathartic release, is so strong that it counteracts the pain of challenging orthodoxy.

Now, imagine there was an entire class of people like this. People whose primary response to alienation is to seek self-expression, stamping one’s self upon the alienated reality, instead of seeking to accept and internalize it.

(And another class of people, the ironic class, who respond to alienated reality by seeking to internalize it… and yet a third class, the schizoid class, which neither needs to internalize reality nor demonstrate self-expression.)

I propose that as an alternative to a Marxist model using economic classes like bourgeoisie and proletariat, that we develop a psychological model using psychological classes like the narcissistic and ironic classes.

We can understand capitalism and communism as different psychologies instead of different economic systems. We could seek to explain capitalism by examining psychological classes in partnership and opposition to each other, instead of the forces of labor and material value.

Using such a psychological model in a critical examination of history — asking which events and institutions are a result of the narcissistic class, for instance — would be an interesting exercise: an alternative to historical materialism.

I think we will find this psychological model more useful when examining the actions of individuals, like William X. Nietzche and the RHAZ protestors.