There's a piece I wanted to write about how narcissism rules my life but also everyone around me, but it ended up featuring so many examples that it became too long to be featured here, and also, there's an irony in how the tone of the writing ended up being imbued with some form of narcissism or at least superiority, which is why I do not know if I'll ever release it in any shape or form.
I observe that I tend to engage in that game quite frequently, the game of trying to be superior to others. I wonder why that is the case. Let me brainstorm a few plausible possibilities here and see where to take this.
Six different reasons is enough for me, but no doubt that they are more, and I listed them all here because they all influence my life to some degree. The last two have more to do with my environment than myself, which is why I am not too interested in examining them further here.
I think the tricky balance which point number 2) hints at, is the fact that if you live consciously, you are going to have higher standards and strive for things which the average person simply doesn't. This is not arrogance, this is reality. Most people simple are not very conscious, they just do things because they never really thought about doing otherwise. That being said, pointing that out is a very slippery slope towards judging those people. 1
I think I am simply not secure enough in myself to do and think things in a radically different way than most, without having some justification in my mind that I am "better" than them. Perhaps it's because we feel the need to justify ourself to others, namely our parents, which makes us on the defensive, and then come up with a bunch of justifications as to why what we are doing is better for one reason or another.
I do think some amount of justification is necessary, because you don't want to commit your life in a direction which you decided in a couple of seconds, on some random impulse, which was probably influenced by stuff you saw on social media anyway. But ultimately, we make different choices because we have a different heart, and I want to live my life mainly around that, rather than some ideas about what my life should be, or worse, the ideas of other people with whom I might not resonate with.
So I think a big part of me playing the game of superiority is that I haven't been able to integrate this sense of being different without turning it into narcissism. Sigmund Freud had this great term called the "narcissism of small differences", which is how people are more likely to engage in feuds with people they are very similar with, rather than people they are totally different from. I suspect that this arises because it is the crudest way to establish oneself as different from others, which is how you get the gazillion different subtypes of metal music, the countless denominations of Christian churches, and the fact that even in fields like mathematics, there seem to be superiority and inferiority complexes, like how applied maths is inferior to "pure" maths—notice the implication of the word "pure"—or how analysis is supposed to be harder than discrete maths. 2
I really don't like that dynamic, but I also can't ignore the fact that I engage in it. I try not to take sides in a conflict unless I strongly agree with one, which does happen from time to time, but more often than not, the conflicts I see around me simply arise from insecurity and lack of proper communication. It's drama rather than a level-headed form of disagreement.
So I would like to be more secure in myself, including the fact that I can be different in important ways, without the need to put down others around me, and focus on making changes in my life rather than constantly comparing with others.
Once again, I don't really know of any specific way to achieve this, except noticing myself again and again slipping into a tone of superiority, and being curious about why that happens. I think curiosity is the key, because if I judge myself for trying to feel superior, then I will slip towards repressing rather than expressing, and only the latter can lead to lasting change.
As a side note, I wonder if having the Divine as the main force which shapes your life is a way to dissolve the game of people constantly comparing themselves with others so as to feel superior. I guess this hints at René Girard's view of people, which I think has many merits to it, but I couldn't help but think when I was exposed to his ideas that he generalized them way, way too much.
Unconscious people by and large follow mimetic desire, and how this leads to scapegoating and dissatisfaction sounds very accurate to me, but isn't the whole point of being conscious about sidestepping that game altogether?
It is important to realize that even conscious people are embedded in a social matrix, which means that in practice, yes they can look hilariously similar to one another. But isn't Love, as well as all the other great virtues, asking us to put aside our petty ego and need to win over others, so as to give rise to something nobler?
Saying that Love is purely mimetic doesn't sit right with me at all, because taking that idea to its extreme, it's saying that nothing has real value on its own, and everything is mimetic. That sounds utterly wrong to me, though I can see how, from the point of view of an unconscious ego, this is mostly right. Rigid egos don't see anything for themselves, especially if they have been beat up by the superego and have all initiative and desires stunted, so they use proxies like what other people think, how much money something costs, amongst others, to estimate the value of something.
But the value of Love is in Love. It's not a solipsistic "I decide it's valuable therefore it is" version of value, it's more like how a flower is beautiful because it simply is, unless you cannot see it because you're too obsessed with solving problems and controlling situations.
But my initial point was that, taking the point of view of the "big Me", the Universe as a whole, makes is rather difficult to judge others, because we are all created from the same Source. I am not saying that it is easy to embody that, not at all, we are humans and have finite selves to maintain after all, but I think that shift towards a more impersonal force is useful for me to drop the game of judgement. The Universe has given rise to complex life on Earth, by some miracle, and nothing it has spawned is subject to being judged. In a sense you could say that how well you deal with Reality, i.e. how attuned to Truth you are, is how you are judged, but it's a very different type of judgement than how humans judge one another, which is always self-biased, based on our own selfish criterions, which typically makes us bad at accepting differences.
1 I notice over and over how quickly observations can turn into judgements. I might write a post about this, but for now it's good to observe that in myself.
2 I don't know if this is universal but this was how it was felt in my department. But I think there is a way in which people judge a subfield by the difficulty of the introductory courses, and real analysis is definitely harder than the typical courses about discrete maths.
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Fear Narcissism Narrowawareness Mimetics
2025-08-04