Jaycee Woods

Recently, I was surprised to hear about single men in their 30s saying that available single women are narcissists. Previously I have heard many single women make that charge against single men, so she was projecting?

Alternatively, not in the clinical sense, maybe both are right about the other in too many cases. Jordan Peterson has noted that the “self-esteem” movement in public schools fostered narcissism. It makes sense to me that giving kids a participation trophy for being instead of accomplishing would lead to demonstrations of false self-esteem with a self-awareness of being an imposter.

In current year, while many traditionalists have talked about a lack purpose in young men and too few people talk about the lack of reason in today’s culture, consider the relationship between the three as expressed by Ayn Rand in Galt’s Speech:

“To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason—Purpose—Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge—Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve—Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living.”

Today our culture preaches: irrational emotionalism, hedonism, and intrinsicism. So certainly, traditionalism is not an alternative as it only objects to pleasure seeking. Another shared defect between traditionalism and our current culture is its attack on self-esteem. As Rand wrote in The Virtue of Selfishness: “The attack on ‘selfishness’ is an attack on man’s self-esteem; to surrender one, is to surrender the other.”

Are narcissists selfish? No, they wear a mask to hide their substantial lack of self & self-destruct.

I have touched a little bit on self-esteem in my draft Selfish World short stories so should keep this in mind while editing them.