The Valorization of Selfishness

Society's message today is too often that you should care more about yourself and your own pleasure

The dissident left writer Freddie deBoer had a great article about how contemporary therapy culture promotes selfishness. He says this despite liking the idea of therapy and in fact regularly going to therapy himself.

He writes about a New York Times article that questions the wisdom of forgiveness, saying:

Do you want to know what ideology is? What we mean when we say “ideology at its purest”? It’s not a collection of policy positions. It’s not a political party you vote for. It’s not even your conscious beliefs about right or wrong, your philosophy about how humans should act individually and collectively and the relationship between those acts and the public and private good. No, ideology refers to those beliefs you do not examine because you do not see them as beliefs at all. Ideology isn’t a matter of ingesting arguments about better or worse, right and wrong, and evaluating them to determine your own beliefs. Ideology is fundamentally the unexamined framework of the system through which you perform such an evaluation, the part you can’t and don’t see; it’s the assumptions that you cannot understand as assumptions. And the ideology that [NYT writer] Caron demonstrates here, the set of assumptions she can’t begin to examine critically because she does not notice them, says that the individual has no responsibility to anyone but themselves. There is no moral duty, there is only the immediate emotional needs of the individual, which eclipses all other concerns, which is sacrosanct. Read the piece! Find me any suggestion whatsoever that other people exist and that we all have moral responsibilities to them, and that putting those responsibilities first is at the heart of emotional integrity and maturity. Those ideas simply aren’t considered….What disturbs me so much is the notion that the only criteria for deciding whether a behavior is worth doing is the individual’s own emotional comfort.

He then says:

I have spent a good deal of time pointing to bizarre and unhealthy Instagram self-help meme culture. I admit that this is often a matter of picking low-hanging fruit, which is fun and easy because a lot of this stuff really is deranged and people find it entertaining when I make fun of it. But I actually do think it’s important on a more meaningful level. I am convinced that the never-ending adult enculturation process we’re all undergoing all the time is far more directed by the minor influences of ordinary life - ambient cultural attitudes, day-to-day exposure to coworkers and friends and social media and television - than it is by abstract political, religious, and moral concepts. And the culture that we’re creating genuinely frightens me. Between said capitalist selfishness, helicopter parenting, social media platforms that inherently reward narcissism, and this whole bonkers quasi-feminist woowoo school of aspirational self help, there’s a never-ending supply of messages telling impressionable people that they should put themselves before others, inverting the most basic human moral principle.

…

The question remains, who in the world could possibly look out at contemporary society and think that the message “put yourself before other people” isn’t loud enough? Every women’s site on the internet preaches this message. Every hustle bro on Threads preaches this message. Every therapist between San Diego and Sacramento preaches this message. Every eight-word meme in overly elaborate cursive font on Pinterest preaches this message. Every asshole who’s still holding on like death to GameStop stock preaches this message. There’s the girlboss version and the Joe Rogan bro version and horoscope obsessive version and the Wall Street grindset version and the fitness guru on trenbolone version…. Justification for selfishness is not in short supply. It is the water in which we swim.

He argues that this has been heavily pushed by therapy culture, which delivers a stream of toxic ideas to people, including:

In the place of rules devised by moral philosophy and religion, therapy culture has erected others, such as

• You, your feelings, and your goals are always preeminent and in any conflict supersede those of others

• You are entitled to total and complete emotional safety at all times, and this entitlement supersedes the rights and desires of others

• Simultaneously, you are a totally, existentially, permanently fragile being

• Since there is nothing that can be endured or recovered from that is not injustice, the concept of resilience is itself an expression of injustice

• That which makes you feel better is that which is right to do

• In any conflict between any two people, there is always one guilty abuser and one blameless victim

• You argue, they gaslight, you have self-respect, they are narcissists, you are still growing, they are toxic, you have boundaries, they have limitations, you hold space, they stand in the way of your growth

• Your own behavior is always a trauma response, and thus not your fault; the behavior of others is always freely chosen, and thus responsibility-bearing

• Any of your behaviors is merely one small step on your journey, and you are still in the process of becoming yourself, any behavior of others you don’t like is constitutive of their very being and cannot change

• Wanting and not getting, for you, can never be an expression of the basic reality of existence, but rather is always evidence of crime, abuse, mistreatment, pathology, injustice

• Everything you feel, do, and are is valid, always valid, until the end of time

It’s a great piece and I’d encourage you to read the whole thing. deBoer is not to the best of my knowledge a religious person, but even he sees that this a big problem.

This idea that “you should be more selfish” permeates our culture today. My wife observed that in a recent Wall Street Journal article on why people were choosing not to have kids, the rationales in many cases were purely about selfish desires.