The ultimate luxury belief—one that combines much of what I call negative narcissism—is: “My people are the worst people who ever lived, and the world would be better off without us.” Just as positive narcissism says, “Daddy is responsible for everything good in the world,” this kind of societal self-hatred is also narcissistic: “Daddy is responsible for all the evil in the world.”
Growing up with a Russian father who is now 100 years old, and being taught world history from an early age, I was always struck by the insularity of this view. I noticed it particularly when I was living in San Francisco after law school. So many highly educated people seemed convinced that America had created problems in the twentieth century that they did not appear to know had existed in other countries for decades, centuries, or, in the case of Afghanistan, millennia.
If your conclusions always come back to “Daddy is responsible for everything bad in the world,” you are still making everything about yourself. It is still narcissism. And negative narcissism is worse than the positive kind. Excessive national pride has its own obvious dangers, but I will take it over national self-hatred.
This is the attitude of a late empire telling itself, “We can afford contempt for ourselves.” But that contempt becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: it is one of the reasons the empire enters its late stage in the first place. (Edward Gibbon FTW.)
J.J. McCullough (@JJ_McCullough)
These land acknowledgements they print on everything in Vancouver are getting weird. They're so long now, with new lines and phrases constantly being added, and they're also kind of getting weirdly self-loathing and aloof to their own existence. Like read that final line.
— https://nitter.net/JJ_McCullough/status/2085137227072623094#m