 My name is Sandvagnin, and I am the author of Madignal Self Love, Narcissism Ritism. Sometimes it seems that we are all going to hell in a narcissistic handbasket. To the narcissist, our civilization is an entopia, a narcissistic utopia. To all others, to the rest of us, it is a dystopia, a dystopia. A narcissistic, horrible, alien wasteland of a landscape. Collectives, societies, and cultures and civilizations can be as pathologically narcissistic as individuals, and in contemporary times they are. Sigmund Freud wrote in Civilization and His Discontents, It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness. A wise man he was. Four centuries earlier, Matthew or Mateo Wici, a Jesuit father, wrote this about the Chinese. Because of their ignorance of the size of the earth, and the exaggerated opinion they have of themselves, the Chinese are of the opinion that only China, among the nations, is deserving of admiration. Relative to the grandeur of empire, public administration, and reputation of learning, they look upon all other people, not only as barbarous, but as unrisening animals. To the Chinese, there is no other place on earth that can boast of a king, a dynasty or of culture. The more their pride is inflated by this ignorance, the more humiliated the Chinese become, when the truth is revealed. Four centuries later, our civilization is all Chinese. It is based on a carpe diem mentality for every man for himself. What's in it for me? Out with the barely old, in with the untried new. Malignant individualism run amok and gone awry, infecting and contaminating every act and behavior. Even charitable giving has been transformed into narcissistic altruism, tax deductible of course. As their societies and value systems implode and crumble, and as their skills are rendered obsolete, people suffer anomic traumas, deep pain, terror-filled disorientation in equal measures. People feel utterly alienated and atomized, and they react with hurt aversion, avoidance, and reclusion. We are all schizoids nowadays. Technology enables it. As empathy, emotional sustenance, and commoner support, solidarity, loyalty, and a sense of belonging, all become relics of a fast-receiving past. The mass victims of anomic trauma put up primitive, stop-gap, their last resort, narcissistic defenses. These, in turn, only exacerbate the very traumatic conditions, social dislocations, and experiences that necessitated their deployment in the fast place. So it is a vicious cycle. Moreover, the anonymity which is the inevitable outcome of life in anthill-begge localesies and in cities with millions of denizens. Today, these are the abodes of three-quarters of humanity in the wake of relentless urbanization, so the anonymity of these three-quarters of humanity is excruciating. In an effort to reassert the self-identity and to remind other people of their existence as something more than a statistic, people resort to ever-escalating attention-grabbing and seeking behaviors, coupled with aggressive boundary-setting. So the grab, as you can, and damn the consequences to yourself and others' mentality spreads across generations and among peers. There is no refuge. No work. Collectives. Large collectives, like nations, the church. Small collectives, like families, workplaces, corporations, neighborhoods. Collectives are rendered dysfunctional by rapid-fire changes and commensurate enabling technology. Our very ability to self-organize, self-assemble and act in unison is in jeopardy as is our future as a species. From the dawn of history to the late 1950s, the collective was the organizing principle of human affairs. The suit of happiness was channeled via collectives, and even dissidents and rebels formed collectives to express their grievances. But this whole system brought humanity to the verge of extinction. Disenchanted with vast ideologies, people switched to the opposite form, militant individualism. And this became the new battle crime, an organizing principle of increasingly more narcissistic collectives and individuals alike. In their book, Personality Disorders in Modern Life, Theodore Millen, Roger Davies, state as a matter of fact that pathological narcissism was the preserve of the royal and the wealthy, and that it seems to retain prominence only in the late 20th century. Pathological narcissism, according to them, may be associated with higher levels of muscle hierarchy of needs. Individuals in less advantaged nations are too busy trying to survive to be arrogant or grandiose. Millen and Davies, like Clash before them, Christopher Clash, attribute pathological narcissism to a society that stresses individualism and self-critification in the sense of community, namely the United States. They assert that the disorder is more prevalent among certain professions, with star power or respect. In an individualistic culture, the narcissist is God's gift to the world, they say. In a collective society, the narcissist is God's gift to the collective. Millen quotes Warren and Capone as the role of culture in the development of narcissistic personality disorders in America, Japan and Denmark. It says, individualistic narcissistic structures of self-regard in individualistic societies are rather self-contained and independent. In collectivist countries, narcissistic configurations of the weed self denote self-esteem derived from strong identification with the reputation and honor of the family, groups and others in hierarchical relationships. I beg to differ. Having lived in the past 20 years in 12 countries on four continents, from the impoverished to the affluent, with individualistic and collectivist societies, I'm in the position to know that Millen and Davies are wrong. Theirs is indeed between essentially provincial, American point of view, which lacks an intimate knowledge of other parts of the world. Pathological narcissism is a ubiquitous phenomenon because every human being, regardless of the nature of his society and culture, develops healthy narcissism early in life. Healthy narcissism is rendered pathological by abuse and trauma, and abuse and trauma alas are universal human behaviors and occurrences. When we say abuse, we need any refusal to acknowledge the emerging boundaries of the individual. Smothering, daunting and excessive expectations are as abusive as beating or incest. With 7 billion humans on the planet, the need to assert oneself, the need to be noticed, to be recognized as unique, is ever more pressing. No one likes to feel like a cog in a machine, an atom in an organism, or a speck of dust among billions. Consumerism and mass communication that lead to global culture and societal homogeneity foster the same narcissistic reactions and provoke the same narcissistic offenses in whole collectives as they do in individual. They are malignant narcissists among subsistence farmers in Africa, nomads in the Sinai Desert, day laborers in Eastern Europe, and intellectuals and socialites in Manhattan. I have lived in all these places. Malignant narcissism is all-pervasive and independent of culture and society. It is true, though, that the way pathological narcissism manifests in his experience is dependent on the particulars of societies and cultures. In some cultures, narcissism is encouraged, the United States. In others, it is suppressed, Japan. In some societies, it is channeled against minorities, the countries of the Balkans. In others, it is tainted with paranoia, Israel. In collective societies, it may be projected onto the collective, China, in individualistic societies, and it is an individual strength. Yet, can families, organizations, ethnic groups, churches, and even whole nations, corporations, be safely described as narcissistic or pathologically self-absorbed? Wouldn't such generalizations be a trifle racist and more than a trifle wrong? Narcissistic profiling? The answer is, it depends. Human collectives, states, firms, households, institutions, political parties, operations, clips, hands. Human collectives acquire a life and a character, all their own. The longer the association or affiliation of the members, the more cohesive and performed is the inner dynamics of the group. The more the Secretary or numerous its enemies, the more intensive the physical and emotional experiences of the individuals it is comprised of, the stronger the bonds of local language and history, the more rigorous might and assertion of a common pathology be. Such an all pervasive and extensive pathology manifests itself in the behavior of each and every member. It is a defining, but though often implicit or underlined, mental structure. It has explanatory and predictive powers. It is recurrent and invariable, a pattern of conduct, melded with distorted cognition and stunted emotions. And it is often vehemently denied by the collective and by its members. So here we are, beginning of a new century, more narcissistic than ever. More psychopathic by the day. On the way to Entopia, to hell in a narcissistic hand-pasted. Happy New Year.