Our narcissistic selves

Once, we disliked and despised the Chinese too. Was it Arthur Calwell, Minister for Immigration at the time, who so wittily reminded us that “Two Wongs don’t make a White?”

Nearer to right now, we have seen something of the same spirit towards Arabs - with more justification, the red-neck Aussies might allege, because these “aliens” are threatening “us” in exercising a narcissistic transference much more intense and dangerous, they would allege, than we have ever done.

So if once we hated Jews and Asians, now we hate Muslims and Arabs. But the hatred or antipathy extends much more widely than that. We hate - or at least we’re not crazy about - those who don’t look like us - whatever it is we think we look like - who don’t pray like us, who don’t think like us, who don’t play our games or abide by what we imagine to be our “moral code”.

So, on the one hand we can acknowledge positives in the transference of identity to those who have qualities that, for sound, enlightened or whatever “good” reason, we admire and think we should embrace.

But there is a flip side: it lies in the negatives in the transference that provoke exclusion and hatred in varying degrees - to be expressed in varying forms of intensity - for those who differ or are imagined to differ from the image we have of ourselves.

We need to be fully conscious of the power of narcissistic transference. It can be to a small family unit or to an association that embraces people around the world. That is both its strength and its menace. A religious cult or sect, a political party, an economic movement can attract millions and coerce millions to do its bidding - or excommunicate those who “betray” the group by questioning what it is doing or may have done.

To complete the process, narcissism and narcissistic transference require something to which the self can be transferred. That means there must be a narcissism whose institutions can receive applications to join, coerce its members and enforce its judgments.

If Australians have the usual endowment of personal narcissism and are equally endowed with the capacity to practise narcissistic transference, so also they have a plethora of institutions - economic and financial, professional, social, religious, sporting and other - which characteristically practise institutional narcissism in their daily activities.

Here - in transferring the self and acting in loyalty to the narcissistic institution that has been chosen - we may think there is something of an element of a distinctive Australian “creed”: “stick by your mates”; “don’t let the side down”; “be a good team player”.

Even here of course, any distinctive character may be only in the intensity of the exhortation. Other human societies know it just as clearly in its essence though they may respond to it less robustly - or much more. They all scream support for their football team, wave flags and recruit religious radicals. Many of them are inclined to despatch suicidal terrorists, in a variety of forms, to slaughter the “other”.

Even in the intensity of the loyalty to the institution of choice the differences between various human societies may be less than we imagine; and it is there, in the universality of the affliction of excessive and misguided faith and belief in the self, that the ultimate danger lies.

Millions or tens of millions may join a movement, via the route of narcissistic transference and institutional narcissism. Their objective may be to pursue their interests by whatever means, if necessary to the disadvantage and perhaps the destruction of other societies. In the end, the road-rage character of much of our narcissistic imperative might thus lead to the destruction of humanity itself. We might suffer the nemesis of Narcissus: self-destruction through overweening pride in self.