Tag Archives: Narcissism

Mother Petitions to End Germany’s Nationwide Youth Games

5 Jul

BXP135660(Image by Tableatny used under CC license via)
The Nationwide Youth Games (Bundesjugendspiele) are a 95-year-old annual tradition here in Germany wherein students ages 6 to 16 spend a day competing against each other in track and field, swimming, and gymnastics. The total scores are read off in a ceremony before the entire school, and those who accumulate a certain number of points are awarded either a “certificate of victory” or a “certificate of honor.” Since 1991, “certificates of participation” have been handed out to the rest of the students.

After her son came home sobbing at having received a mere certificate of participation two weeks ago, journalist Christine Finke started an online petition to put an end to the Games. She explains on her blog:

I’m doing this for all the children who feel sick to their stomach the night before the Nationwide Youth Games, for those who wish they could disappear into the ground during the Games, and for those who want to burst into tears during the awards ceremony… Sports should be fun and make you feel good about your body. But the Nationwide Youth Games are founded on grading: on the upgrading and degrading of some at the expense of others.

She dismisses the Games as a relic of the Nazi era, and while the original Reich Games preceded Hitler, founder Carl Diem did go on to be active member of the regime who instrumentalized the Games as propaganda for the Nazi obsession with bodily perfection. Finke points to the Nazi-like language of her critics on Twitter: “Our children shouldn’t be allowed to turn into sissies.”  Indeed, mottos such as Only the strong survive commonly found in sports culture in the U.S. and other countries are not taken lightly here in Germany, where sick and disabled citizens were murdered in mass numbers less than a century ago. 

As a semi-disabled kid, I had plenty of physical limitations, but, like most kids, I enjoyed the sports that I could play fairly well (baseball, tennis, jump rope) and I quickly got bored with those that put me at the bottom of the class (basketball, football, soccer).  Due to the vulnerability of the narrow achondroplastic spinal column, I wasn’t ever allowed to participate in gymnastics, and contact sports were forbidden after the age of 10 when my peers began to tower over me.  I countered the feelings of exclusion with feelings of pride for holding the pool record for staying underwater (1 minute 15 seconds), and for surpassing everyone in the joint flexibility tests. But what about the kids whose bodies ensure that they will never surpass anyone else in any competition? The best advice I ever got came from my primary school physical education teacher: “If you had fun, you won.” 

But then came adolescence, and with the onset of puberty, the body suddenly is no longer merely something that gets you from place to place. It becomes an object you are expected to sell to others in the brutal competition of dating and mating. It’s no wonder that an almost debilitating self-consciousness encompasses so many, whether in the form of sitting out of sports, refusing to ever dance or, in extreme cases, developing disordered eating habits.

I asked adult German friends how they felt about the Games. “It is the most humiliating memory I have from school!” one responded.

“It’s more likely to teach people to stay far, far away from sports for the rest of their lives, rather than inspire them to be more physically active,” argued one mother.

“Ach, it wasn’t humiliating,” insisted one man. “It was boring. It was all about skipping out to go smoke cigarettes while the super-athletes had their fun.”

“Exactly!” chimed another. “No one cared about it except the ones who won everything.”

I spent my high school years as the scorekeeper for the girls’ volleyball team at the urging of one of the two coaches, whom I both admired greatly. Throughout three years of volleyball games, I witnessed edifying examples of cooperation and self-confidence, and I witnessed a lot of childishness and borderline cruelty from overemotional adults as well as teens.

From that time on, I’ve generally viewed competitive sports the same way most people view rodeos or yodeling clubs – i.e., good for you if you derive joy from that sort of thing, but the competitions and the medals say nothing to me about whether or not you’re a lovely person. 

Of course athletic achievement can signify important life skills like self-discipline and team work, as a recent Michigan State University study has found. But sports are not necessary for developing those skills. Self-discipline can also be demonstrated by reading two books a week or vowing to learn a foreign language and actually doing it.  Tolerance, self-confidence and decisiveness has been shown to increase among students who study abroad.  Team work can be learned from playing in a band.  Or, as LeVar Burton taught us on Reading Rainbow, an aerobics-inspired dance troupe. 

In arguing to keep the Games, physical education teacher Günter Stibbe says, “Sports are brutal, of course.  But students have to learn how to deal with humiliation.”

Indeed, narcissism is characterized not just by excessive bragging but also by reacting badly to criticism or failure.  Performing poorly in sports—or in any field—can be an opportunity to learn to accept all the moments in life when you won’t be seen as special. But the idea that the body is only worth what it can do is deleterious. And too many educators fail to teach students the dangers of being too competitive and fearing weakness. 

The heavier burden may in fact fall on those who come out on top in high school and risk later panicking when they learn that the big wide world doesn’t really care about how many points they accrued in the discus throw back when they were 16.  Both the losers and the winners would benefit from learning that athletic competitions in youth are no more important than rodeos or yodeling competitions at any time in your life.  After all, points and medals are no indication of whether or not you’ll know how to pursue healthy relationships, be a responsible member of your family and community, or find a fulfilling career. Those who heavily brag on into adulthood about how hard they just worked out down at the gym—or how many books they read, or how much they earn—usually appear to be compensating.

This is perhaps why Stibbe criticizes the tradition of reading of the scores in front of the whole school as “pedagogically irresponsible.”

But in Der Spiegel’s online survey, there is no option for arguing for the Games on the grounds of sportsmanship and accepting one’s limitations. The two arguments to click on to support the tradition are “For God’s sake! It was the only thing I was ever good at in school!” and “What else would we do with our crumbling race tracks?” The majority of the 57,000+ respondents chose the latter.

 

 

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How To Do Empathy Wrong

23 Nov

sssssh(Image by Valentina Cinelli used under Creative Commons license via)

Have you ever had someone say to you, “I know exactly what you’re going through!” only to have them then rip into a monologue that proves they have no idea what you’re going through?

SarahKat Keezing Gay, whose newborn son needed a heart transplant, has had plenty of experiences with this:

One of my favorites has always been people comparing children’s issues with those of anything that isn’t a child. “Oh, I know just what it’s like to have a newborn. My cat wakes me up all the time!” or “Having kids is expensive, sure, but it’s nothing like having a horse.”

With Hud’s medical stuff, most of the comparisons were to really old people with totally different, usually terminal conditions. “I know just what it feels like to wait for a baby to get a heart transplant. My 85-year old great-uncle had liver disease, and waiting for his transplant was so hard on my family!” … This was particularly chafing when entangled with glaring inaccuracies, such as: “He’s sick? When my grandma went through chemo, she looked terrible, so he must be taking lots of herbal supplements to stop the hair loss and everything, right?”

She is hardly the first survivor of trauma who has had to deal with blunt comparisons that are ultimately unhelpful. In college, I witnessed a trust fund kid compare his worries about paying for a new car to a trailer park kid’s worries about paying for his course books: “I hear ya, bro – I’m struggling, too!”

The best way to get along with the rest of the world is to try to understand it. And most understanding is achieved by comparing the unknown to that which we already know. But there is an unproductive tendency in the it’s-a-small-world-after-all mindset to relativize all hardship to the point of equating all hardship. Twilight star Kristen Stewart told interviewers that unwanted paparazzi photos made her feel “raped.” Millionaire businessman David Harding pronounced the words “geek” and “nerd” to be “as insulting as n*****.” Famed divorcée Elizabeth Gilbert of the Eat, Pray, Love franchise declared that divorce can be more anxiety-inducing than the death of a child, asserting this in a book devoted to gushing about the joys of her new-found love. I don’t know Gilbert or Harding or Stewart personally, so it would be presumptuous to conclude that they must simply be naïve and have no idea what trauma or death threats or bereavement feel like. But their utterances are false equivalencies that alienate more people than they enlighten.

In the recent words of NPR’s Annalisa Quinn: “ ‘We’re all the same on the inside!’ is not that far from ‘Everyone is like me!’ which is not that far from ‘My perspective is universal!’ ” The phrase I know exactly what you’re going through, while sometimes well-intentioned, can ultimately be silencing because it puts the listener in the awkward position of having to choose between keeping quiet and trying to find a gracious way to say, “No, you don’t know what I’m going through.” Saying such a thing can come off as angry and self-involved, so most polite people opt instead to hold their tongues, sparing the other person their upset but also an opportunity to be taken out of their comfort zone and learn about an experience they’ve never had.

In his adorable piece “How To Be Polite,” Paul Ford writes that the fastest way to make a friend as an adult is to ask them what they do for a living and—no matter what their job is—react by saying, “Wow. That sounds hard.” The last time he used this line he was talking to a woman whose job it was to pick out jewelry for celebrities.

It’s a sure-fire way to a person’s heart because we all think we work really hard. We all think we have had trials and tribulations. The blues would never have broken out of the Mississippi Delta if we didn’t. But while our lives are all equally important, they are not equally painful:

Everyone on earth is privileged in some way, but not everyone has experienced severe pain.  Arguing with family, enduring rejection in love, searching for a lucrative and fulfilling job, dealing with the bodily break-down that comes with the onset of age – it is all cause for pain. The pain is both valid and common, which is why there is a plethora of books and films and songs about these experiences. And which is why we expect such pain from life and why it is fair of others to expect us to learn how to deal with it. It is substantial, but it is not severe.

Those who experience severe pain are, thankfully, becoming a minority as our society becomes ever safer and healthier, with rates of life-threatening illness and violence lower than they have ever been in human history. But misery loves company, and severe pain brings on not only profound stress but great loneliness. That’s why support groups exist. Having friends who try to understand, not because they see a chance to tell their own story but because your happiness genuinely matters to them, is lovely. Their efforts signify bravery. But they can never offer the unique comfort of connection that blooms from really knowing what you’re going through.

This was clear when I recently spent an evening at a dinner table where I was the only one who did not have a parent who had died or disowned me. It is clear whenever I read Keezing Gay’s accounts of her baby’s transplant, which moves me to tears every single time, all of them merging to constitute but a drop in the ocean of what her family went through.

The middle-aged mother of a deceased teenager said to me months after her death, “Our friends in Utah got the wrong news and thought for a while that it had been me. That I was the one who died. And I immediately thought when I heard that, Why couldn’t it have been me?  I had a good life.  My life was good until this moment.”

My life was good until this moment.

Unlike mundane pain, severe pain so often brings perspective. Of course, whether or not it does ultimately depends upon the wisdom and strength of the individual. This fact is lost on those who uphold the long tradition of viewing severe pain as a beauty mark worth yearning for because it supposedly imbues the sufferer with automatic heroism. This tradition pervades many circles, though most often those of the young and artsy navel-gazers.

Wes Anderson, who may be our generation’s king of the artsy navel-gazers, captured this problem surprisingly well in Moonrise Kingdom. The scene involves two pre-teens: Suzy the Outcast, who is angry about her mother’s infidelity and often gets into fights at school, and Sam the Oddball Orphan, who has been bounced around from foster family to foster family before being bullied at camp.

She tells him dreamily, “I always wished I was an orphan. Most of my favorite characters are. I think your lives are more special.”

Her sweetheart pauses and narrows his eyes. “I love you, but you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Because it’s not empathy when it’s all about you.  As Nigerian feminist Spectra wrote in her critique of American Mindy Budgor’s white savior complex gone wild: “This isn’t about people ‘staying where they are’ and disengaging from the world. This is about learning to engage with other cultures with some humility, or at least some bloody respect.”

There is no benefit to engaging in Oppression Olympics; i.e., to trying to prove that abused children have it worse than soldiers with PTSD, or that black women have it worse in the U.S. than gay men. But there is a benefit to acknowledging the differences between their experiences as well as the differences between mild, moderate and severe pain. The benefit is true understanding.

Shortly after an uproar over her rape comment, Kristen Stewart apologized for her crudeness. Acknowledging what we don’t know is an indispensable step in the path toward true understanding. The most deeply thoughtful, impressively modest people I know do this all the time. Their frequent deference in combination with their unwavering support proves that there’s a world of a difference between trying to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and assuming you’ve already worn them.

 
*As in all of my posts, the identities of many of the people cited here have been altered to protect their privacy.

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Does Pride In Being Different Lead to Narcissism?

11 May

Being different(Image by Niccolò Caranti used under CC 2.0 via)

 

Long before there was Buzzfeed, there were online personality quizzes. (Back in the Analog Age, they featured in teen magazines like Sassy and YM.) Today they’re the rabbits of the Internet, every new one that pops up signifying ten more in gestation. “Which Mad Men Character Are You?” “Which Star Wars Character Are You?” “What City Are You?” Leading columnist Emma Roller to wisely observe, “No one cares.”

Just for once, I’d love to see a quiz-taker being told: You’re Werda, Germany! Or You’re Selden, New York: You’ve got some nice areas and some sketchy areas, and a lot of perfectly fine but nondescript highways and sidestreets. A famous person passed through once, though that was ages ago. Some people like you, some people don’t. Most people haven’t heard of you except the couple thousand people who live there, plus the people who visit them or send them mail.

Or how about a quiz that announces, You’re one of the soldiers in Star Wars who gets killed in the first three minutes. Without you, and a bunch of other characters like you, there would be no shoot-out scene, and without the shoot-out scene, the audience wouldn’t know soon enough that they should fear the Empire. You are certainly useful—that’s why the actor who played you got paid after all—but no one will be looking for your name in the credits.

If such a result on a personality quiz sounds unthinkably cruel, then maybe we really do have a narcissism epidemic on our hands. Narcissism, after all, is the tendency to put your own needs ahead of others’ because, deep down inside, you believe you are more deserving of praise and sympathy. Because you’re different and special. (“Maybe there are a lot of Werdas and Seldens out there, but not me!”)

Every single one of us needs to feel special to someone, but the severity of this need can determine the difference between being self-confident and being self-involved. And when minorities embrace our exceptionality and take pride in being special, are we part of the problem?

It is easy to understand why minorities celebrate diversity with pride parades and slogans. Anyone who has been beaten up, harassed, or excluded for qualities they have no control over is understandably in need of a salve, whether that means spilling their hearts out in group therapy or singing along with the Columbus Gay Men’s Chorus, “I am beautiful, no matter what they say.” When I mentioned to my mother that I’d been asked at school at least ten times in one month, “Why is your head so big?” she replied, “Just tell them you have an extra package of brains, honey!”

It was a sweet, wonderful piece of advice. With one hitch. My ten year-old self took her explanation literally, thrilled by the news that dwarfs are neurologically advantaged! And even when I later found out that she meant it figuratively, I continued to believe for a period that I was truly smarter than any ignoramus who had questions about my body. Society does have many hang-ups about difference that fuel rude questions and comments, and this is indisputably problematic. But it is also problematic to counteract these hang-ups with the conviction that your difference makes you essentially better than everyday people.

It is no coincidence that the minority rights movements of the 1970s and 80s peaked right before the height of the self-esteem movement. With self-determination seen as the key to obliterating prejudice and fear of the Other, millions of children in my generation grew up chanting, “I’m special!”  I remember singing along with Piglet and Tigger:

If everybody were like everybody else,

How boring it would be.

The things that make me different,

Are the things that make me, Me!

Stand tall.

You’re in a class by yourself.

Be proud.

You’re not like anyone else.

No doubt about it.

You’re second to none,

’Cause you’re the one and only,

Genuine, original,

You’re the one and only one!

This approach was very well-intentioned, but half-baked.  Everyone is special insofar as everyone is unique. But we so often use “special” interchangeably with “extraordinary,” as in: not merely unique, but better than the rest. It is statistically impossible for everyone to be second to none. We can simultaneously be unique and ordinary, yet it’s a fact that is hard for us to wrap our heads around and even harder for our egos to accept. It is unsurprising that raising a generation of individuals to celebrate their exceptional qualities has unleashed millions of adults who are now struggling to deal with the countless moments in which they are reminded that they are not all that different from anyone else. And who wince at the thought of being called “average.”

This doesn’t have to yield narcissism, but it can. Narcissism causes people to repeatedly bring up their differences not in order to feel comfortable with them, but in order to prove their exceptionality. It causes them to talk more than they listen, to abandon relationships after the initial shine wears off, to justify hurting their partner or bailing out on their families. Narcissism causes non-famous people to pity themselves as underappreciated, undiscovered geniuses lost in a sea of lowly idiots, and it causes famous people to fanatically envy those who are more famous. Narcissism can cause someone to not merely believe in changing the law in the pursuit of justice but to see herself as being above the law. And while it may help her keep her head held high when someone criticizes her unfairly, narcissism leaves her bitter and spiteful when the criticism is on the mark. 

And where there is narcissism, there is the savior complex – the desire to help people not because you would want someone to do the same for you in the same situation, but because you recognize an opportunity to be seen as special. This attitude betrays a very bleak view of minorities and those in need – the self-appointed savior believes they should be grateful to him because he is exceptionally open-minded, unlike normal people, who would be repulsed by them.

This is why the minority rights movement is inherently opposed to narcissism. Narcissism upholds hierarchies and depletes empathy, and there can be no human rights without empathy.

In fact, being seen as ordinary is the ultimate goal of any minority rights movement. After counteracting fear and hatred with enough celebration of diversity to preserve everyone’s well-being, most minorities hope to one day garner about as much recognition as left-handed people. In the West today, no one tries to nervously change the subject or get ready for attacks when someone brings up their left-handedness, nor do they gush about how great it is to know someone so different! The idea of putting left-handed people on display in a theme park is unthinkable. Not only would that be spectacularly inhumane, but who on earth would go? Left-handedness is interesting, but it’s not that interesting.

Narcissism fosters an addiction to the idea of being recognized as interesting. Encouraging a wallflower ostracized for her looks to question mainstream beauty standards can help boost her self-satisfaction and all-around happiness.  Encouraging her to disregard anyone who doesn’t explicitly praise how she looks can trigger anti-social behavior. So how do we avoid this?

Superb articles at Slate and The New York Times have been exploring better methods for teaching children modesty and emotional intelligence, while recent novels like this and articles like this have been making self-proclaimed progressives examine our sometimes monstrously selfish habits. And how did I come to stop thinking that my dwarfism made me superior?

A few months after our discussion about my exceptionally sized skull, I was bragging to my mother about being the only kid at my elementary school with dwarfism. Although I don’t remember exactly what I was bragging about, I vividly remember my mother’s concerned look before she said, “I hope you don’t think you’re special.”

W-w-hat? Wait, I’m not special? Her words stuck with me like a stone in my shoe, as most good pieces of advice are wont to do.

My parents are the most supportive people any child could wish for. They also called me out whenever they sensed I was taking up too much space.   

My dad beamed upon hearing that I had passed all of my exams after having struggled to find time to study during a year of two surgeries and lots of physical therapy. But he laughed in my face the next summer when I tried to boast about working TWENTY hours a week.

At the end of one of my limb-lengthening procedures, when six metal rods were unscrewed from my thigh bone without local anesthesia, I screamed until I couldn’t hear myself anymore because the femur is the biggest bone in the body and the pain matched its size. The last coherent thing I remember shrieking was directed at my surgeon: “I HATE YOU!” My mom later told me he apologized to me with every turn of the screw, but I was too hysterical to notice. What I do remember is lying on the table with no one left in the room but my mother and her friend who had come along to help, my eyes stinging with the salt of the tears, hyperventilating and moaning until the friend interrupted me: “Emily, stop it! You’ve cried enough. It hurt, you were upset, but now IT’S OVER.”

That’s what friends are for. To be proud of your achievements, sympathetic to your pain, and to also tell you when you’re being ridiculous.

 

 

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