Selfie: How the West Became Self-Obsessed

by Will Storr

One way of looking at suicide is as a catastrophic breakdown in the human self. It’s the most extreme form of self-harm there is. Even if you haven’t actively plotted your own death, many people have surely experienced at least a fleeting thought: I could solve this. I could vanish. I have reason to suspect that this kind of thinking, although taboo, might be more common than you might imagine.

Indeed, it’s certainly true that, today, overall rates in the US and UK have seen a general decline since the 1980s. But it’s also true that today more people die by suicide than in all the wars, terrorist attacks, murders and government executions combined. According to the World Health Organisation, in 2012, 11.4 people out of every 100,000 died by self-harm versus 8.8 people as a result of interpersonal violence, collective violence and legal intervention. Its projections indicate things are going to get worse. By 2030, it estimates that that difference will have increased to 12 versus 7. In the UK, in 2000, 3.8 per cent

adults reported suicidal thoughts – a

figure that had jumped to 5.4 per cent by 2014. In the US, suicide rates recently...

Today, over a twelve-month period, between 8 and 10 per cent of the entire adult population of the US and UK uses antidepressants.

there are twenty times more attempted than completed suicides every year.

is, men make up around 80 per cent of all suicides in the English-speaking nations,

Rory and his team have developed a model for suicidal thinking that is based, in part, on an influential paper by the eminent psychologist Professor Roy Baumeister, in which it’s described as an ‘escape from the self’. Baumeister theorized that the process starts when events in a person’s life ‘fall severely short of standards and expectations’. The self then blames itself for these failures, and loses faith in its ability to repair what’s gone wrong. ‘We believe it’s a feeling of being defeated and humiliated from which you cannot escape,’ said Rory. It’s not enough just to feel like a failure, a self must also lose faith in its capacity to change. ‘It can be internally and also externally, so you’re trapped by life circumstances, you can’t see a way out,

‘It’s a feeling of being stuck,’ I said. ‘Absolutely. This sense of entrapment, which all comes back to control.’

One of the most critical functions of the human self is to make us feel in control of our lives.

One recent survey found that only 61 per cent of young women and girls in the UK felt happy with their bodies, a significant decline from the 73 per cent that had been found just five years before. Meanwhile, nearly a quarter of seven- to ten-year-olds felt they ‘needed to be perfect’, an already troubling figure that grew much worse with adolescence: in eleven- to twenty-one-year-olds, the proportion soared to 61 per cent.

‘body image dissatisfaction is high and on the increase’. All of us, male and female, are apparently feeling increasing pressure to be perfect.

says the modern world is giving us a greater number of opportunities to feel like failures.

‘In part, that’s because of the internet and social media. First, when a public figure makes a mistake there seems to be a much stronger, more intense and quicker backlash. So kids growing up now see what happens to people who make a mistake and they’re very fearful of it.’

People are suffering and dying under the torture of the fantasy self they’re failing to become.

So there’s self and then there’s culture. Two separate things. It’s the self that wants to become perfect, and it’s our culture that tells it what ‘perfect’ actually is.

The first modern ‘human’ brain arrived in the fossil record around two hundred thousand years ago and yet for well over one and a half million years we existed as hunter-gatherers in tribes. It was during this time that our brain, and the self it produces, underwent much of its crucial development. We still carry this prehistoric tribal nature with us

‘Everything you do in life is to distract you from yourself,’ he said. ‘Suddenly you’re just faced with you.’

Humans have spent more than 90 per cent of their time on earth existing in groups as hunter-gatherers and these basic instincts live on in all of us. If we’re to understand who we are today, we should start by getting a glimpse of who we were back then. One way we can do that is by comparing our behaviour to that of the chimpanzees. We share a common ancestor, and more than 98 per cent of our DNA, with these animals.

Along with the bonobo, they’re our closest living relatives. By observing behaviours the human self shares with the chimp self, we might find clues as to which parts of us are so old they predate our ascent to the top of the world.

The biological anthropologist Professor Richard Wrangham has observed that chimps and humans share ‘a uniquely violent pattern of lethal intergroup aggression . . . Out of four thousand mammals and ten million or more animal species, this suite of behaviours is known only among chimpanzees and humans.’

So we’re tribal. We’re preoccupied with status and hierarchy; we’re biased towards our own in-groups and prejudiced against others. It’s automatic. It’s how we think. It’s who we are. To live a human life is to live groupishly. Laboratory experiments have found that

humans, upon meeting someone new, will automatically encode just three points of information about them. What are these three things the brain considers so fundamentally vital? They are age and gender, which are essential for basic social interaction, and also race, which isn’...

that all you have to do to generate spontaneous prejudice and bias in humans is to randomly divide one group of them into two. I’ve experienced the effects of the tribal self many times in my own years of reporting, everywhere from South Sudan where, caught up in the tribal civil war, I was abducted and just about escaped being shot, to the narco-zones on the hills outside Guatemala City.

With his obsessive interest in reputation, John was once again being silently manipulated by his tribal self. But in this, he’s hardly alone. Caring about what others think of us is thought to be one of humanity’s strongest preoccupations. Children start attempting to manage their reputations at around the age of five.

still today, a core activity of the human self is maintaining a deep interest in, and trying to control, what others think of us. We’re all, to some degree, anxious and hyperactive PR agents for our selves.

When we realize our reputation is bad, the self can enter a state of pain, anger and despair. It might even start rejecting itself.

Reputation lives in gossip. It’s in the delicious little tales we tell each other that our reputations – these radically simplified avatars that represent us in the social world – are given life. Our appearance as characters in moral stories means we’re automatically cast as heroes or villains, our flaws or attributes magnified, depending on our role in the plot. And we can’t help but gossip. Studies that measure how much of human conversation it constitutes put the figure at between 65 and 90 per cent. At the age of three, children start communicating their ideas of who can and can’t be trusted t...

Our helplessly gossipy nature is another inheritance from our tribal pasts. The anthropologist Professor Robin Dunbar has famously attempted to calculate the size of the human tribe, as it would’ve been back then. ‘Dunbar’s number’, as it’s known, came out at just below 148. Imagine being born into a tribe of 148 people. How would you keep track of them all? How would you

find out who were the good people and who were the bad; who were the ones who’d share the meat and who would steal from you and stab you in the throat? A little bit of tittle, a little bit of tattle, that’s how. But gossip wasn’t just a way of gathering crucial intelligence. It was also there to police the tribe.

All of which brings us to a crucial place in our journey. It’s in these ancient tribes that we begin to sense the deepest causes of our modern feelings of perfectionism.

We also wanted to be perceived well by others so we could rise up the hierarchy of the tribe. Our chief concerns, in the well-known words of the psychologist Professor Robert Hogan, were ‘getting along and getting ahead’. We wanted to get along with others, by making a good reputation, and then use that good reputation to get ahead.

I understood the extent to which the behaviours we class as ‘selfish’ or ‘selfless’ are mediated by our tribal brains. Remember those toddlers who just naturally expected members of their group to share with each other?

They weren’t surprised that a person would refuse to share with someone from a different group. Selfless acts are most often made on behalf of our people. From John’s point of view, he felt he was selflessly putting himself at constant risk of violent attack and imprisonment, in order that he could serve his gang better. From their perspective, he was being selfless. He was striving to be a person who was of most benefit to his tribe. The celebrated mythologist Joseph Campbell explained this principle well: ‘Whether you call someone a hero or a monster is all relative to where the focus of your consciousness may be. A German [fighting in WWII] is as much a hero as the American who was sent over there to kill him.’ So here we are, back to our tribe and our tribishness. When we feel as if we want to become perfect, it’s largely our tribe that defines, for us, what ‘perfect’ actually is. One of the ways it communicates this definition is via gossip, which often

focuses on people breaking some important rule. Because of our tribal roots, all humans share the basic principle that a good person is selfless. These are the universal basics. Today we might not live in literal tribes, but we do exist in psychological ones. We’re all members of many overlapping ‘in-groups’. We might identify as black or Asia...

But there’s one final, crucial point to make about reputation. Humans are self-conscious creatures. We’re constantly watching ourselves, judging ourselves, just as other people are judging us. When we catch ourselves behaving in obviously selfish ways, our minds alert us with a sense of alarm we call ‘guilt’. We begin to experience guilt before the age of one. It’s not pleasant; we like to believe that we’re good people, the ideal self that deserves to rise to the top of the tribe. As anyone who’s suffered from painful perfectionistic thinking can testify, we don’t only crave a good reputation amongst others, we also crave it with ourselves. *

It’s often said that the self is a ‘story’. If this is so, then, on the night of the Devil, John’s story underwent an astonishing rewrite, turning him from violent gangster to worshipful Catholic. The events of that strange night hold

To begin to understand what happened to John, we need to consider just one facet of what psychologists and neuroscientists mean when they talk about this idea of the self as a ‘story’. Doing so reveals something important and disturbing about the human self: that it is built to tell us a story of who we are, and that that story is a lie.

Consider, for a moment, what it is to be a conscious human. There are, essentially, four parts to the experience. Firstly, you have the experience of your senses – the sights, the sounds, the smells, the tastes, the physical sensations felt by the skin. Secondly, you have your sense of hallucinatory travel – your mind can summon images of past, future and fantasy. Thirdly, there is your emotional experience – that constantly churning ocean of fear, excitement, love, desire, hate and so on that writhes and swells beneath your days. Finally, you have your internal monologue, the chatty voice that narrates it all, interpreting everything that’s happening to you, discussing it with you, making theories about it, never shutting up.

Now remember John’s night of the Devil. What were the different components of his experience? First, he was hearing a disembodied voice. Second, he was remembering ideas ...

that he’d come across in his Western Christian culture. Third, he was feeling dread. Finally, and most importantly, he was hearing his internal monologue. His inner voice was tying all the disparate elements of his experience together and turning them into a useful story that would make sense of it all. It was saying, ‘That horrible voice you’re hearing is Satan. It means you’re going to hell. But don’t be scared, John, you know what to do. You need to pray to God for forgiveness.’ John believes what happened to him, that night, was a visitation from the Devil. But for me, it seems more likely that he had a brief psychotic episode, and what saved him from having a full and sustained breakdown was that voice in his head, maintaining his sense of control, telling ...

the ‘left-brain interpreter’. If the self is a story, then prepare to mee...

interpreter was first properly exposed in the 1960s by a team that included cognitive neuroscientist Professor Michael Gazzaniga. They dreamed up an ingenious method of fooling it. They did this by taking advantage of epilepsy patients who’d undergone ‘split-brain’ surgery, in which the wiring that connected the brain’s two hemispheres had been cut to prevent dangerous ‘grand mal’ seizures spreading across them. Amazingly, these procedures worked, and the patients were able to lead relatively ordinary lives. But because their brains had been split, and most of the word- and speech-making circuitry that the interpreter relies upon is in the brain...

know they were there, it couldn’t ‘tell’ its owner about them. This is how it worked: they would angle pictures and videos in a specific way towards the patient’s left eye and then, because of the way in which the brain’s wired up, the images of those pictures and videos would travel into the patient’s right hemisphere. But because their right hemisphere had no inner voice it couldn’t say, for example, ‘It’s a photo of a chicken,’ and so the patient would have no conscious idea that they’d seen anything, let alone a photo of a chicken. If a man’s right hemisphere was shown a picture of a hat, say, he would deny having seen anything at all – but then be alar...

‘The left-brain interpreter is driven to seek explanations or causes for events,’ wrote the scientist. ‘The first makes-sense explanation will do.’ Along with his team, who called these stories ‘confabulations’, he demonstrated it happening again and again. When one man’s silent right hemisphere was commanded, by a sign, to ‘walk’, he obediently stood up and walked towards the kitchen. When asked why he was doing this, he confabulated: ‘Because I’m thirsty.’ A woman’s silent right hemisphere was shown a picture of a pin-up girl. When it was enquired of her why she was giggling, she too confabulated, telling the researchers they had a ‘funny machine’.

Remember, these people weren’t making these errors because they were ‘mad’ in any sense. All the surgery did was enable Gazzaniga to expose the work of the interpreter. The discomforting truth is that we all have interpreters narrating our lives, and they’re all just guessing. We all confabulate, all the time. We’re moving around the world, doing things and feeling things and saying things, for myriad unconscious reasons, whilst a specific part of our brain constantly strives to create a makes-sense narrative of what we’re up to and why. But the voice has no direct access to the

real

reasons we do anything. It doesn’t really know why we feel the things we feel and why we do the thi...

Since these experiments, study after study has demonstrated ordinary, everyday confabulation in non-split-brain participants. My favourite involves people who were shown two photos of members of the opposite sex and asked to choose which they were more attracted to. The photos were then placed face down and, with a magician’s sleight of hand, switched. The photos were then shown again, now in the wrong positions. Incredibly, only 17 per cent of participants noticed that they’d been switched. Those that didn’t notice were asked to give a detailed explanation as to why they’d found this person more attr...

Our brains invent stories like this because they want to make us feel we’re in control of our thoughts, feelings and behaviour. The guesses the interpreter makes might be right. But they might just as easily be wrong. ‘When we set out to explain our actions, they are all post-hoc explanations using post-hoc observations with no access to nonconscious processing,’ writes Gazzaniga. Any inconvenient facts that don’t fit with the interpreter’s story are ignored or suppressed. ‘That “you” that you’re so proud of is a story woven together by your interpreter module to account for as much of your behaviour as it can incorporat...