The Tyranny of the Selfie.
While I’m no particular fan of many of the doctrines of traditional religion, I’m always open and curious to why certain faiths have enjoyed such longevity. In part, I think, is in the role of religion to foster a sense of shared identity and, subsequently, community cohesion and cooperation. After faithfulness to god, all of the major faiths prescribe how we should treat each other: love thy neighbour, forgive, give to the poor, treat others equally, serve. Hinduism invokes the notion of karma. Over half the commandments given to Moses describe how to treat others.
In contrast, with the demise of traditional religion (alongside the rise of neoliberalism) we see the ascent of a particular brand of spirituality that is explicitly self-serving. We are now invited to treat the whole universe as a catalogue. Just ask for what you want and, if you get it just right, the universe will give it to you. I am not sure there could be a clearer demonstration of our society’s endorsement of narcissism than to encourage the belief that the WHOLE INFINITE UNIVERSE is invested in you having a new car.
And this glorification of the self is on the rise politically. Rather than treating people equally, we have the spread of an ideology that actively atomises society into smaller and smaller self-identity-based-fractions. Had any of those promoting this considered basic human psychology they might have clocked that, far from being a panacea for inclusion, highlighting and foregrounding the many (potential) ways that we are different from (rather than similar to) one another, only gives us more fronts for out-grouping and antagonism. It erodes trust.
And here on social media we all have the opportunity to be our own ‘brand’. The self as commercial entity. The self as commodity.
The problem with this new brand of self-obsession (which I actually see as a population-wide regression to infancy, “His Majesty the Baby” as Freud observed) is that a 𝐟𝐮𝐧𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 society needs more than self-gratifying individual units. The driver of our evolution as a species was our hard-won skill of cooperation. We 𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐝 each other. This kind of self-love will tear us apart.