Joanna's Narcissism (4)

Twelve days ago Joanna M. wrote me the following:

Hellooo Stan,

How are you?? I am still in Barcelona, now that summer is almost over it's getting much better, really looking forward to winter… I am trying to find a new job now and especially to figure out what I wanna do exactly. 

Hope you're in good health and high spirits!

Best,

Joanna

This further confirms my view that even a person without an identity is unable to escape themselves. It is pointless to constantly escape reality. Ultimately, every person is confronted with themselves, precisely when, at the age of 28, they feel compelled to admit that they have to “figure out what I wanna do exactly.” Most of her friends already know what they want and have a partner. I warned her that her short-lived affair with an older married “Bulgarian man with children” would end in nothing. I am afraid she lacks a certain empathy to truly connect with someone else. Joanna once told me that she burst out laughing when a one-night stand twice failed to put on a condom. She let him drown, and laughed about it.

Joanna M. and her contemporaries are children of their post-modern time, who, in “The Culture of Narcissism,” in which the West is trapped in this “Age of Diminishing Expectations,” feel compelled to stand up only for themselves. And those who fail succeeding are considered losers, who, just like themselves, have no right to speak. That is also why Joanna asked me time and again whether fat still considered her “intelligent.” In his sensational book The Culture of Narcissism (1979), Christopher Lach argues:

“The international dimensions of the current malaise indicate that it cannot be attributed to an American failure of nerve. Bourgeois society seems everywhere to have used up its store of constructive ideas. It has lost both the capacity and the will to confront the difficulties that threaten to overwhelm it. The political crisis of capitalism reflects a general crisis of western culture, which reveals itself in a pervasive despair of understanding the course of modern history or of subjecting it to rational direction. Liberalism, the political theory of the ascendant bourgeoisie, long ago lost the capacity to explain events in the world of the welfare state and the multinational corporation; nothing has taken its place. Politically bankrupt, liberalism is intellectually bankrupt as well. The sciences it has fostered, once confident of their ability to dispel the darkness of the ages, no longer provide satisfactory explanations of the phenomena they profess to elucidate. Neoclassical economic theory cannot explain the coexistence of unemployment and inflation; sociology retreats from the attempt to outline a general theory of modern society; academic psychology retreats from the challenge of Freud into the measurement of trivia. The natural sciences, having made exaggerated claims for themselves, now hasten to announce that science offers no miracle cures for social problems.”

In an afterword from 1990, Lasch adds to this:

“Narcissism, as I had come to understand it, was not just another name for selfishness. Nor was The Culture of Narcissism conceived of as a book about the ‘me decade’ or the retreat from the political activism of the sixties. It grew out of an earlier study of the American family, Haven in a Heartless World, which had led me to the conclusion that the family’s importance in our society had been steadily declining over a period of more than a hundred years. Schools, peer groups, mass media, and the “helping professions” had challenged parental authority and taken over many of the family’s childrearing functions. I reasoned that changes of this magnitude, in an institution of such fundamental importance, were likely to have far-reaching psychological repercussions. The Culture of Narcissism was an attempt to analyze those repercussions — to explore the psychological dimension of long-term shifts in the structure of cultural authority.”

And there they are, the Joanna’s of 2026, as adults trying to find out who they are, and what they want to become, laughing because someone does not know how to handle a condom she gave a one night stand to prevent a sexually transmitted disease, currently “trying especially to figure out what I wanna do exactly.” Until now, being 28 years old, she never felt forced to think about this, while in the meantime life passed her by, never noticing that even she had become responsible for the world around her, because she wanted to remain a child, who never was asked what she was thinking. This is the tragic of modern times. Now she is suddenly confronted with her own sadness. She has “to figure out” were she is standing in a world that is decaying very fast. Somewhere in this unending space of time there must be someone who can give the Joanna’s in the world the most precious thing in life, being love. 

Listen to Bob Dylan’s “Boots of Spanish Leather”:

“Oh, I’m sailin’ away my own true love

I’m sailin’ away in the morning

Is there something I can send you from across the sea

From the place that I’ll be landing?

No, there’s nothin’ you can send me, my own true love

There’s nothin’ I wish to be ownin’

Just carry yourself back to me unspoiled

From across that lonesome ocean

Oh, but I just thought you might want something fine

Made of silver or of golden

Either from the mountains of Madrid

Or from the coast of Barcelona

Oh, but if I had the stars from the darkest night

And the diamonds from the deepest ocean

I’d forsake them all for your sweet kiss

For that’s all I’m wishin’ to be ownin’

That I might be gone a long time

And it’s only that I’m askin’

Is there something I can send you to remember me by

To make your time more easy passin’

Oh, how can, how can you ask me again

It only brings me sorrow

The same thing I want from you today

I would want again tomorrow

I got a letter on a lonesome day

It was from her ship a-sailin’

Saying I don’t know when I’ll be comin’ back again

It depends on how I’m a-feelin’

Well, if you, my love, must think that-a-way

I’m sure your mind is roamin’

I’m sure your heart is not with me

But with the country to where you’re goin’

So take heed, take heed of the western wind

Take heed of the stormy weather

And yes, there’s something you can send back to me

Spanish boots of Spanish leather”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iy6wryJMwVU

The Hell of Western Culture of Narcissism. J.M. Don't become like them.