Saturday, February 6, 2016
A few years ago, psychologists Josh Foster and Joan M.Twenge published a book called The Narcissism Epidemic. In this blog post, Twenge says they have done another study “showing that narcissistic traits are increasing even faster than we previously thought.” Some of their colleagues disagree, pointing to other data or methodological flaws in the work of Foster and Twenge. They could be right. But this is precisely the trend Christopher Lasch diagnosed in The Culture of Narcissism. And the outcome Tocqueville, Mill, Webb, Hobhouse and others once feared. One could argue that Foster and Twenge describe a mostly American cultural tendency. Tocqueville once felt, however, that in the United States he could observe the future shape and character of the whole civilized world. And that could still be the case.
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