Narcissism Rides The Electronic Road

In my January 5, 2025 blog, “Dishonored Prophet,” I wrote about several instances in which my ideas and writings were prophetic but largely disregarded. One prediction that I made was not mentioned in that blog, but it is particularly relevant to the current state of the country and the world.

The prophecy was conveyed in two steps, the first in the form of a bouncy folk-rock song I wrote 30 years ago, and the second, that followed about five years later, in the form of a short and obscure article published in a small psychiatric newsletter. The song was titled “Information Highway” and the article was titled “Technology and Narcissism.”

When I selected which of my original songs were to be included in a (fingers crossed) soon to be published YouTube site that my daughter, our friend, David and I are collaborating on, I decided to discard that song because it was outdated in its description of the computer technology of its time That was a mistake, compounded by the fact that I had no digital record of the lyrics and tossed out the hard copy. Fortunately, I remember most of it. What follows is a portion of this song whose prophetic nature was not fully appreciated, even by me, at the time I wrote it.

The opening verse describes the marvelous equipment that I was employing to access the Internet at that time, and the song goes on to describe how “wonderful “it was to be able to never leave my home or deal face to face with people in order to conduct any business or to make any purchases. I was the center of a universe that existed to fulfill my every desire. Then it goes on like this:

Chorus: “Because I’m riding down that information highway, that electronic road, Got a mega-speed disk, so there ain’t no risk of data overload. I’m gonna roll on down that highway, won’t be left behind, Gonna have it all my way on that information highway, Gonna ride it to the end of the line.”

The bridge goes: “I got a virtual reality, bodysuit, man, it fits, just like a glove, gonna access my baby on the Internet, and make some long slow cyberspace love.”

The last verse: “All around the town, all around the world I can spout off anything I choose. Never have to meet you or shake your hand, and I still get all the news. I can break a thousand hearts and never look back, don’t need no conversation, just send me the fax. Gonna love ’em and download ’em, so kiss my modem, and don’t bother calling back “

As you can see, this song is a protest to the narcissistic nature of our era, and how technology reinforces, facilitates and normalizes narcissistic behavior.

Over the years of my psychiatric practice, the nature of the patients who presented for therapy was changing rapidly. Previously a typical patient was diagnosed with a neurotic disorder characterized by anxiety based symptoms. These were related to unconscious guilt caused by desires, impulses or actions that did not comply with the standards of an overly restrictive Victorian society. As those strictures eased over the second half of the 20th century, the people filling the consultation rooms of therapists were increasingly diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorders. These are characterized by a grandiose sense of self importance (masking a deep sense of shame and inferiority) and demands that the world bow down to their wishes and opinions. They perceived people as merely “objects ” who exist for the purpose of gratifying their desires and affirming their “greatness.” The objects were “all good” if they bowed down. Those who did not were “all bad.” Further, these objects were “split” so that a single individual would be alternately praised or vilified depending on their reaction to the narcissist’s sense of entitlement. Anything that was bad about the narcissist was projected onto the object so that the narcissist was never to blame for anything. Anxiety and depression were overshadowed by a simmering rage awaiting any excuse to be unleashed. A hallmark of pathological narcissism is that the narcissist is totally unaware of their own narcissism. No matter how ignorant they are, they perceive themselves as brilliant and infallible. Narcissism is at the heart of many antisocial and criminal behaviors.

Such patients presented an incredible challenge to a therapist because they lacked insight. They would react with rage at the therapist even at the slightest suggestion that perhaps they, themselves, were responsible for the poor relationships they had with people. They insisted that their problems were due to the failure of the world to give them everything they wanted whenever they wanted it.

In the article, I predicted that our materialistic culture, supercharged by modern technology, would reinforce societal narcissism. We would all become “objects” and would objectify each other. There would come a time that narcissism was no longer viewed as abnormal. The prediction at the time was limited to the likelihood that the normalization of narcissism meant that psychotherapists might soon be out of a job.

It came to pass, for a variety of reasons, that therapy, by which I mean the intensive, life changing type, indeed fell out of favor. Along with severe restrictions insurance companies placed on coverage of psychotherapy and the cessation of the teaching of psycotherapeutic technique in psychiatric residency programs, advances in psychopharmacology made it possible to give narcissists drugs that would alleviate their emotional discomfort and unhappiness so that they could merrily go on being, in plain English, jerks. Psychiatrists became pill pushers, treating symptoms, not people, because dispensing drugs was easy money compared with the complexity and challenges of psychotherapy.

When I wrote that song and published that essay, I did not fully foresee what was waiting at “the end of the line” of the information highway. Now that endpoint is coming into view. The Internet has provided tremendous power to the forces of greed that objectify people as “consumers” who exist to make the rich richer. Meanwhile, the masses of self-preoccupied and ignorant users of that technology, converts to the cult of narcism, have been hoodwinked into elevating a poster child of narcissism to the position of dictator. Conversation, compromise and empathy have been replaced by an insatiable need for gratification of our petty desires and the objectification of others around us who now exist solely to fulfill our wishes.

Thirty years ago, who would have predicted we would arrive “at the end of the line” to watch helplessly or, worse, with approval or indifference, as the biggest narcissist of all proceeds to destroy democracy in what what was once revered as its modern birthplace?