2022 Is the Year We All Finally Got Tired of
Narcissists
Narcissists had their moment in the sun. But in 2022,
some of them got their comeuppance and some of them got worse: our disinterest.
By JOANNA
WEISS
12/26/2022
04:30 AM EST
Joanna
Weiss is a POLITICO Magazine contributing editor and the editor of Experience
magazine, published by Northeastern University
It’s been a
good run for the narcissists.
Over the
past decade or so, a mix of shameless self-aggrandizement and self-confident
charm has served certain people extraordinarily well, turning them into
venture-capital darlings, licensed-merchandise magnates, Forbes cover models,
social media superstars, Oprah confessors, business-conference keynoters,
new-money plutocrats and, in one case, president. Elon Musk, Sam Bankman-Fried,
Ye (né Kanye West), Elizabeth Holmes, Meghan Markle, Donald Trump: All of them
used attention as currency and ego as fuel, and were rewarded, for a time, with
what they craved. We’re drawn to people who love themselves.
But
somewhere between the fifth and sixth hour of “Harry and Meghan,” the new
Netflix documentary series produced by the former Duke and Duchess of Sussex
and filmed at their California mansion — which suggests that there is no one
more in love, no one more socially conscious, no one more aggrieved — my
natural sympathy for the couple started turning to irritation, and it occurred
to me that ego has its limits. And it struck me that the overreach that led to
the Sussexes’ critically panned mega-series is the same impulse that turned
Elon Musk into a terror on Twitter, that prompted Ye to up the ante of
outrageous behavior until he crossed the line into blatant antisemitism, that
sent Bankman-Fried from the top of the world to a Bahamian jail.
Some of
these turns of fate are more dramatic and complete than others. But once we
tally up the losses, it could be that 2022 marks the year our love affair with
narcissists started to falter. Many of them met this year with declines in
fortunes, falls from grace or newfound public skepticism. Many seemed to
overstay their welcome in the public glare. And if this is the moment when we
started to crave boring public figures for a change — well, to a large degree,
the egotists did it to themselves. Maybe they couldn’t help it.
“I think
right now people are getting sick of it,” said John P. Harden, a political
science professor at Ripon College, when I tested my theory of narcissism’s
limits to him over the phone. I’d reached out because Harden studies narcissism
in politics: For a 2021 paper in International Studies Quarterly, he reviewed
detailed surveys of presidential historians, correlated them with psychology
research, and created a kind of narcissism index for U.S. presidents up to the
early 2000s. Toward the bottom were Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush and Calvin
Coolidge. At the top were Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Theodore Roosevelt.
Harden’s theory is that ego can drive history: In international conflicts, a
narcissistic president is likely to fret about being disrespected, threaten
opponents and act unilaterally, ignoring advisers or allies.
Narcissism
can be a clinical diagnosis, Harden told me, but social scientists define it as
a personality trait. It shows up on a spectrum: All of us have some degree of
self-love, which probably explains our behavior on Facebook and Instagram. But
the people Harden calls “grandiose narcissists” — or, at one point in our
conversation, “charismatic attention hogs” — stand apart. They believe they’re
the absolute best at what they do. They go to great lengths to protect and
defend their egos. They strive to be unique and promote themselves
energetically.
That’s the
story, in a nutshell, of Harry and Meghan, who at first seemed uncommonly savvy
for the way they’ve managed their public lives: breaking free of British royal
misery, then cashing in spectacularly on the drama. In 2020, they inked a
reported $100 million development deal with Netflix. In 2021 came their
blockbuster Oprah interview and a reported $20 million advance for Harry’s
tell-all memoir, Spare.
Their
current Netflix series premiered to high ratings and an explosion of media
thinkpieces (made you look!). Part of it is chilling: an up-close look at the
British tabloid press, complete with heart-wrenching footage of Harry’s mother,
Diana, hounded by paparazzi. But the legitimate complaints are wedged between
glamour shots, from footage of Meghan getting fitted for ballgowns to a vast
collection of flattering photos and videos they took during their royal exit,
apparently preparing for a photogenic tell-all. Even sympathetic critics have
groused that there’s little new here, beyond the vanity. In The Guardian,
Marina Hyde compared the couple to “a pair of ancient mariners with a TV
contract, condemned to tell their tale to everyone they meet.”
If the
Sussexes’ addiction to the public eye is benign — they seem tiresome, but
genuinely well-intentioned — a narcissist’s constant quest for eyeballs and
acclaim can get a lot more dangerous. For the worst of it, see Ye, whose
perennial need for attention has evolved from outbursts at awards shows to
wearing “White Lives Matter” T-shirts and making antisemitic comments on
podcasts, social media platforms and TV shows — losing, in the process, a
lucrative Adidas contract and what was left of the public’s goodwill.
For other
cautionary tales, see Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried, who won over
investors by creating myths around themselves: Young geniuses in signature
clothing (she, the black turtleneck; he, the cargo shorts), smarter than the
skeptics and the experts. Holmes, through her blood-testing company Theranos,
was going to change medicine; Bankman-Fried, with his cryptocurrency exchange,
was going to upend finance and philanthropy.
The more
adulation they got, the more dramatic the fall. Bankman-Fried appears to have
been running a garden-variety Ponzi scheme; this month, he was indicted for
fraud and money laundering. Holmes hid the fact that her technology didn’t work
from investors and consumers; this year, she was convicted of fraud and
sentenced to 11 years in prison. At her sentencing hearing, U.S. District Judge
Edward Davila pondered why she’d done it: “Was there a loss of moral compass
here? Was it hubris? Was it intoxication with the fame?”
Investors
are probably asking similar questions of Musk, who was recently dethroned as
the richest man in the world. Musk has always been a volatile public figure,
but his stewardship of SpaceX and Tesla gave him an aura of hyper-competence.
Then he took control of Twitter, firing staff and picking fights, as his brand
and businesses suffered. Twitter is bleeding users. Tesla stock was down nearly
30 percent in December. Musk has gone from iconoclastic role model to popular
punching bag. “It’s amazing,” the British broadcaster Shaun Keaveny tweeted at
him after a recent eruption, “how you manage to be, on the one hand, one of the
most powerful people in the world, and on the other, a massively needy
attention-seeking tool.”
But Harden
says the need to constantly up the ante, seeking more attention even if it’s
self-destructive, is part of a narcissist’s nature. “These people have this
hyperactivity, this constant need to do something … filtered through this
inflated self-view,” he says. They draw the spotlight, attention wanes, and
they try to do it again.
Maybe that
explains the Trump NFTs, which put an outlandish cap on a not-so-great year for
the 45th president. It’s been a rough stretch, between the January 6 committee
hearings, New York Attorney General’s investigation into his company and the
Justice Department’s raid of Mar-a-Lago. But nothing was worse for Trump than
the midterm elections, when his chosen candidates almost all failed, and he
lost his claim to be an enduring political kingmaker.
If Trump is
no longer invincible, his allies of convenience finally have reason to ignore
him. And for Trump, there’s nothing worse than being ignored. The Washington
Post recently reported that he’s so miserable in Florida, without a press corps
to summon at will, that an aide asks his friends to call him with affirmations.
On Truth Social in December, he promoted a “MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT” that turned out
to be a line of Trump-branded NFTs. They look like an artist’s rendering of his
ego: Trump riding a blue elephant, surrounded by flying gold bars, wearing a
superhero getup with lasers coming out of his eyes.
Even his
allies mocked him. On the other hand, 45,000 of the tokens sold out in less
than a day — whether out of devotion or curiosity or the sense that they’d be
bizarre collector’s items someday. It’s hard to count any narcissist out; it’s
not in their nature to give up the stage, even in exile, sometimes from jail. When
they want attention, they get creative.
It’s the
public that has to decide whether to bite. In the political realm, Harden has
seen cycles: After the public tires of a particularly narcissistic president,
voters choose new leaders with more modesty and restraint. Nixon’s resignation
gave way to Gerald Ford, then pathologically humble Jimmy Carter. The midterm
elections seemed to match the pattern. Trump-endorsed candidates and election denialists
— some of them Trump-like media hogs — were largely passed over in favor of
less flashy moderates and split-ticket voting.
Whether
people will also refrain from buying the next Sussex book or worshiping the
next business wunderkind is a story for 2023. But there are signs, at least,
that our patience is fading. Last week, before Christmas, Musk asked Twitter
users whether he should step down as CEO, and 57.5 percent voted “yes.”
Somebody wants quiet time, at least until the next appealing narcissist comes
along.
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