On Pride

 

Thomas Merton wrote, “Pride makes us artificial. Humility makes us genuine.” 

A sort of robotic artificiality indeed seems characteristic of narcissists. Their smile is mechanical, as if pasted on; or it is a smirk, a sort of half-smile. Scott Adams says there is something about the eyes not smiling with the mouth that gives away insincerity.

They cannot be spontaneous, because they do not dare lose control. For this reason, they cannot have a sense of humour. Humour requires letting go. They do not understand it, and so will laugh inappropriately. They are just mimicking what they see and hear others do, without feeling it. The one thing they might find funny is watching other people in pain, mental or physical. Someone slipping on a banana peel.

Can narcissism be cured? Psychiatry says no. I have always been loath to believe this: can anyone be beyond redemption? I compared it with alcoholism: breaking an addiction is hard, but not impossible. People do. Surely one can also break an addiction to pride?

But there is indeed a point at which one is, in Christian teaching, beyond redemption: Hell is forever. If you die in mortal sin, and descend, there is no possibility of redemption beyond that point. “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” Like it or not, that is the clear Biblical teaching.

Doesn’t this match our experiences with narcissism? At a certain point, to wit, the point of confirmed narcissism, it would not matter if one had an infinite stretch of time, one is never going to pull out of this. Like Lucifer’s choice of self over God: Satan is not one day going to be redeemed.

An addiction to self is after all far more encompassing than an addiction to some single pleasure or vice. To invest your very identity in your vice means breaking the addiction looks impossible. There is no one there, outside of the vice itself, to break it. You have no other identity. Your soul has been devoured.

That is why the narcissist seems zombie-like, an NPC.

It may be going too far, however, to say ambulatory narcissism is yet incurable. Why would God allow the narcissist to stay alive, and doing harm to others, past this point? It makes more sense to assume that the point at which the narcissism is absolutely incurable is the moment God will step in and send to Hell. So long as there is the slightest chance for the narc to turn, God will give them that chance. 

But well before this point, the change might require a miracle. It may be beyond human agency, and so of course the psychiatrists cannot do it. Neither can any well-meaning relative.