Selfie - Will Storr Flashcards
THEMES
Dying Self - Suicide/Perfectionism/Self-esteem
Tribal Self - DNA/Chimpanzees/Status/Hierarchy/Gossip
Perfectible Self - Ancient Greece/Body ideal = ethically good/Personality/Self features: nature vs nurture. Group (Confucian) vs individual (Aristotle)
Bad Self - Christianity/Original Sin
Good Self - Self-help/Positive thinking/Post-war US
Special Self - Self-esteem /Neoliberalism/Individualism/Ayn Rand
Digital Self - Silicon Valley/Narcissism
We are supposed to be slim, prosperous, happy, extroverted and popular. This is our culture’s image of the perfect self. We see this person everywhere: in advertising, in the press, all over social media. We’re told that to be this person you just have to follow your dreams, that our potential is limitless, that we are the source of our own success.
But this model of the perfect self can be extremely dangerous. People are suffering under the torture of this impossible fantasy. Unprecedented social pressure is leading to increases in depression and suicide. Where does this ideal come from? Why is it so powerful? Is there any way to break its spell?
To answer these questions, Selfie by Will Storr takes us from the shores of Ancient Greece, through the Christian Middle Ages, to the self-esteem evangelists of 1980s California, the rise of narcissism and the selfie generation, and right up to the era of hyper-individualistic neoliberalism in which we live now.
It tells the extraordinary story of the person we all know so intimately – our self.
Not just another attack on ‘millennial narcissism’.
Storr places this unedifying phenomenon in the history of the context of Western individualism.
The selfie is the ‘logical conclusion’ of a long-term
cultural fetishising of the self?
We must embrace our own imperfections and not worry about unattainable utopias.
Book Zero - The Dying Self
One way of looking at suicide is as a catastrophic breakdown in the human self. It’s the most extreme form of self-harm there is. Many people have surely experienced at least this thought: I could solve this. I could vanish. This kind of thinking is more common than we imagine.
If you’re prone to social perfectionism, your self-esteem will be dangerously dependent on keeping the roles and responsibilities you believe you have. There is a relationship between social perfectionism and suicidality.
Men compare themselves against a masculine ‘gold standard’ which prizes power, control and invincibility. We are hyper-sensitive to social criticism.
Another risky trait is brooding rumination - continual thoughts about thoughts.
Suicidal thoughts are an ‘escape from the self’
One of the most critical functions of the human self is to make us feel in control of our lives.
One US study found body dysmorphic order to be nearly as present amongst men as it is amongst women.
Perfectionism isn’t something we either have or don’t have: it’s not a virus or a broken bone. It’s a pattern of thinking.
The modern world is giving us a greater number of opportunities to feel like failures.
It feels as if we’re creating a psychological environment for ourselves to live in that’s toxic.
Every self is different but there are fundamentals of how the human self operates.
General model of ideal selfhood in today’s culture: extroverted, slim, beautiful, individualistic, optimistic, hard-working, socially aware yet high-self-esteeming global citizen with entrepreneurial guile and a selfie camera. It’s usually younger than 30.
The Western model of self really began in Ancient Greece. It was there that our idea of ourselves as potentially perfectible individuals who are responsible for our own fates came into being. I want to track this idea of ‘Individualism’ as it evolved through the ages of Christianity, industry, science and psychology, right through to Silicon Valley and the era of hyper-individualistic and competitive neoliberalism most of us have grown up in.
We often fail to realise that the things we believe are, to a significant extent, a combination of beliefs, stories, philosophies, superstitions, lies, mistakes and struggles of flawed men and women - our culture, in a word.
Voices from long-dead minds haunt us in the present, often without our conscious awareness.
So there’s self and then there’s culture. It’s the self that wants to become perfect, and it’s our culture that tells it what ‘perfect’ actually is.
Book One - The Tribal Self
First modern ‘human’ brain arrived in the fossil record around 200k years ago, yet for well over 1.5 million years we existed as hunter-gatherers in tribes. It was during this time that our brain, and the self it produces, underwent much of its crucial development. The basic instincts of hierarchy, territory, tribal politics and struggle for status and resources exist within all of us.
We share a common ancestor and 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees. We have many eerie similarities with them. They are political animals. They exist in tribes. They hide their feelings. They hold long-term grudges. They negotiate peace and have a sense of fair play. They have a preoccupation with hierarchy: weaker and younger chimpanzees regularly engage in conspiracies and coups.
Were tribal. We’re preoccupied with status and hierarchy; we’re biased towards our own in-groups and prejudiced against others. It’s automatic. It’s how we think.
All you have to do to generate spontaneous prejudice and bias in humans is to randomly divide one group of them into two.
Our helplessly gossipy nature is another inheritance from our tribal past.
We wanted to get along with others by making a good reputation, and then use that reputation to get ahead.
Any functions and tendencies that are already in place, when we’re born, must be absolutely fundamental to the self i.e. they are not acquired through learning.
A large body of work now suggests that when humans say ‘good’, what they really mean is ‘selfless’.
Today we might not live in literal tribes, but we do exist in psychological ones. We’re all members of many overlapping ‘in-groups’.
We no longer have to rely solely on gossip to show us what kind of person we ought to be if we want to get along and get ahead.
It is often said that the ‘self’ is a story. The discomforting truth is that we all have interpreters narrating our lives, and they’re all just guessing. We all confabulate all the time. We’re moving around the world, doing things and feeling things and saying things, for myriad unconscious reasons, whilst a specific part of our brain constantly tries to create a make-sense narrative if what we’re up to and why.
The voice has no direct access to the real reasons we do anything. It’s making it up.
When we set out to explain our actions, they’re all post-hoc explanations using post-hoc observations with no access to non-conscious processing
Book Two - The Perfectible Self
The bizarre notion - that physical appearance and moral worth are directly linked - is so deeply sunk into my brain that I feel it to be true on an emotional level. But it’s a cultural invention.
The Ancient Greeks had the idea that being physically beautiful was the same as being ethically good. They had a word for this: kalokagathia coming from ‘kalos’ meaning beautiful and ‘agathos’ meaning good.
This idea that the bodily form is inherently important for understanding who someone is, is still with us.
It’s odd and hard to accept that a great deal of who we so intimately feel we are is the product of the thoughts and experiences of long-dead people.
The self’s ingestion of culture can be tracked in the growing brain of the baby. When we’re born our brain is ready for the world. It rushes out to greet it and then prunes itself down, specialising itself for the particular culture in which it finds itself.
Much of the environment’s influence over who we turn out to be takes place in childhood and adolescence, periods in which our brain is in its phase of heightened, developmental plasticity. Influencing the way our brains initially wire up are our genes. But a genome does not specify the final form of the brain. It really just specifies the starting conditions.
Culture’s influence on the self is more insidious. It comes at us from many directions: friends, family, social category etc, whose cultural norms we’ll be susceptible to absorbing.
Culture can be seen as a web of instructions, like computer code, that surrounds and saturates us. It tells us what a person should be - what it likes, how it behaves, what it wants. We internalise these rules, then begin adhering to them as if they were laws of the universe.
It’s both remarkable and depressing that the body ideals of Ancient Greece look so similar to ours today.
Peer outside the bubble of the West, however, and things are very different. In Tanzania, being fat is a sign of status. People comment in a negative way if you lose weight.
Our obsession with youth too turns out to have a cultural root. In our culture, we think being in your 20s is brilliant.
So there are some features of the human self that we all share no matter where we’re from:
Our tendency for groupishness
Our gossip-outrage-punishment pattern of social policing
Our valorisation of selflessness and hatred of its opposite
Our restless desire to get along, which gives us prestige, and get ahead which gives us status
Our storytelling brain with its confabulating narrator
These are some of the self’s most ancient parts; the rest is determined by culture.
The history of personality must start with the Greeks. Here it was, the age of perfectionism in its emerging form - a culture of veneration and the pursuit of the perfect human self.
In Greek life, the talents of remarkable people were fetishised. Sublime statues depicted ideal masculine and feminine forms.
Since the days of Aristole, we have tended to see ourselves as individuals rather than part of a connected whole.
The model of the ideal self has been moulded by the following eras:
Ancient Greece - Perfectible Self Medieval Christianity - Bad Self Industrial Revolution - Good Self Post-war America - Special Self Silicon Valley - Digital Self
Our tribal brains cast haloes around our friends and plant horns on the heads of our enemies.
Our brain is often over generous with its estimation of ourselves. Virtually all individuals irrationally inflate their moral qualities.
The brain is a storyteller and it’s also a hero-maker.
Narratives that psychologically healthy people adopt feature a ‘strong protagonist, a leading man or woman who takes charge and works towards a desired goal.’
Confucian thinking written down in the Analects.
For descendants of Confucius, reality is not a collection of individual objects but a field of interconnected forces.
The legacy is that Easterners (collective) and Westerners (individual) think about the World very differently.
Studies suggest that Asians don’t feel the need to be in control of their lives as much as Westerners. Change is the function of the group rather than individual. Harmony is prioritised above freedom.
Chinese are wiling to accept idea of unjustly punishing someone if that make the group better off.
There is no word for ‘individualism’ in Chinese.
Greek notion of a living hell: Sisyphus pushing a rock up a hill only to have it roll back down again for eternity.
Does the self begin to fail when we lose control of our narratives?
South Korea has one of the highest teen suicide rates in the world, explained by the country’s rapid move to city life and the resulting collision between collectivist Eastern and individualistic Western culture. It’s a culture without roots.
Christianity eventually arose out of the fall of the ancient world. The perfect self was not one of fame and glory but one of pious virtue. The righteous man lived humbly and obediently.
Book Three - The Bad Self
Success cues (owning a Ferrari) impress because of how our brains have evolved. This behaviour is automatic and unconscious.
Christians began to turn the struggle inwards. It wasn’t about Olympic glory but a continual battle - with prayer, self-denial, flagellation - to make their inner selves better. This is where low self-esteem gets built into the core of the machine.
The Christians had given Western self a soul and then begun to torture it.
This preoccupation with the state of our inner selves - its moral cleanliness - is still an enormous part of our culture and daily experience.
Unlike the holy books of Islam and Judaism, the New Testament was always understood not to be the literal word of God, but recollections about Jesus ‘according’ to his disciples. This left a gap of understanding to be filled by study and debate. In contrast, the Koran confidently asserted itself to be ‘the Scripture whereof there is no doubt’.
In contrast, St Paul admitted that ‘our knowledge is imperfect and our prophesying is imperfect’.
Book Four - The Good Self
The Western self began being lovingly penetrated by narcissism in 1960s US. Our fetishisation of personal authenticity and being real began here.
For many years America remained a nation under the oppressive grip of the old-world God. It had been settled by Calvinists.
When it finally severed its cord with that old world, it became a radically new kind of place. Declaration of Independence: ‘all men are created equal’. This was the starting point of an American revolution of the self that would infect us all.
Although Christianity’s heavy presence remained, especially in the deep interest in self-denial, temperance and purity of the soul, getting along and getting ahead were increasingly up to the individual.
Great Depression and World War 2 led to a dramatic reaction against untrammelled individualism. It brought a new, collective era of ‘class compromise’ between rich and poor. A series of state interventions led to an extraordinary narrowing of the income gap.
Rather than there being a godlike centre to us all, we actually contain a collection of bickering and competing selves.
The self is a ‘powerful deception generated by our brains for our benefit’.
‘There is no core. There is no centre. There is no soul. You the person is not separate from your thoughts.’
Our sense of self-worth is a reflection of what we think other people think about us.
In his book, the Self Illusion, Bruce Hood cites its creator, the sociologist Charles Coooley who wrote: ‘I am not what I think I am and I am not what you think I am; I am what I think that you think I am.’
We become obsessed with status. We constantly seek validation. We constantly signal status. We dread insult and crave good reputation.
Once we’ve satisfied our basic food and housing needs, we’re motivated to pursue validation from other people.
Our lack of true authenticity means we behave depending on context e.g. our job. We act in ‘bad faith’.
Our sense of who we actually are turns out to be critically dependent on what we believe others think of us - the looking-glass self. It exposes the social perfectionist in every one of us.
Self-loathing is what happens when our brain’s hero-making capacities become defective. When we’re happy we’re essentially distracted from the truth of our situation - that our lives are ultimately pointless, that we live in a realm of chaos and injustice, and that everyone we love is going to die.
Book Five - The Special Self
We’re now living in Ayn Rand’s world. She wrote books that raged against the collectivist spirit of the Great Compression that had overcome the US.
She found worldwide fame with her book ‘The Fountainhead’ which was a hymn to individualism, a moral argument that human civilisation was the work of single-minded creators who needed to be free, in order to build.
‘The first right on earth is the right of the ego’.
As she laboured on the follow-up book a small group of acolytes gathered around her - ironically known as the ‘Collective’.
Their pursuit was ‘virtuous selfishness’ which would dismantle the calamitous Great Compression, and replace it with small government, deregulation, lower taxation etc.
Rand claimed that the only thinker to have ever influenced her was the father of individualism, Aristotle. In order to achieve, people had to first love themselves.
‘I hold that man should have self-esteem’.
Atlas Shrugged imagined a dystopian America entirely controlled by the state, in the which the creators rebelled to form a new world - a place of reason and freedom.
‘A free mind and a free market are corollaries’, she once said.
One member of the Collective was Alan Greenspan.
Objectivism is a philosophical system developed by Rand (1905–1982). Central tenets are that:
1/ Reality exists independently of consciousness, and that human beings have direct contact with reality through sense perception (Aristotle)
2/ The proper moral purpose of one’s life is the pursuit of one’s own happiness (rational self-interest)
3/ The only social system consistent with this morality is one that displays full respect for individual rights embodied in laissez-faire capitalism
Great Compression came to an end in the 1970s - in the US/UK everything started to go wrong - inflation surged, stock markets crashed, oil crisis, steel crisis, banking crisis etc. It was in these tumultuous times that Greenspan began manoeuvring himself into a position of enormous power. The idea that quickly emerged as favourite was ‘neoliberalism’.
This term is most commonly associated with economist Friedrich Hayek. He compared the central planning of the Great Compression to the Nazi and Communist movements. It has put us on a ‘road to serfdom’.
For the game of neoliberalism to function it requires winners and losers.
Trump was in many ways, a definitive creature of the neoliberal, self-esteem, celebrity era.
Book Six - The Digital Self
This generation have internalised the neoliberal economy. People are interested in entrepreneurship as a general social value.
Part of neoliberalism’s genius is that it has, as its electricity, our natural desire for status - it rewards the impulse for getting ahead of the rest of the tribe that’s inherent in the human animal.
Social media is making the polarisation between left and right much worse. The more emotional we become, the less rational, the less able to properly reason. In an attempt to quieten the stress, we begin blocking and unfollowing. We’re now in an echo chamber, yet more convinced of our essential rightness.
The rise in individualism has also brought a dramatic decline in empathy.
Book Seven - How to stay alive in the Age of Perfectionism
Therapeutic interventions can affect (but not transform) traits.
Although genes are not destiny, they do set certain limits.
Parents have no systematic influence on the personalities of their children. Parents tends to radically overestimate how much control they have over how their children turn out.
Behaviour is a result of a combination of situation and genes.
We have this culture in which you beat yourself up if you’re not perfect. Give yourself a break. Don’t take responsibility for being screwed up. We’re not advocating fatalism - just give yourself a break.
It’s a great hubris to imagine we have any idea what it’s like to be like anyone else. We have this very foolish idea that people who are successful are happy and vice versa.
Western culture prefers us to believe that we’re not defined or limited and that we’re all born as blank slates. This seduces us into accepting the cultural lie that we can do anything we set our minds to. This false idea is of immense value to our neoliberal economy.
The stories of our neoliberal tribe insidiously persuade us that there’s an ideal form of self and then defines it for us. We internalise this story. We try to become this hero, forcing ourselves into its shape, in the gym and in the office.
What these stories don’t tell us it that it’s all a lie. You’re not a hero. You’re not a God. You’re an animal.
First step is to stop believing the tribal propaganda. Free yourself from its demands. Your head will become a much calmer place to be. Stop the war of perfection.
If we want to inch towards happiness, we should stop trying to change ourselves and start trying to change our environment - the things we’re doing with our lives, the people we’re sharing it with and the goals we have.
