Selfie: How the West Became Self-Obsessed

by Will Storr

of course, John Pridmore’s favoured method of exerting influence. But we also hunt for two more mercurial qualities that do much to explain not only the way in which individuals end up having outsized effects on their culture, but the often barmy world of celebrity we inhabit today. These cues are success and prestige.

Research suggests that we start mimicking people who we see displaying competence when they’re completing tasks at around the age of fourteen months. As we grow up these ‘skill cues’ begin to take on a more symbolic form, as ‘success cues’. In our hunter-gatherer pasts, it would’ve made sense to copy the actions of the hunter who wore many necklaces of teeth made from his kills, for example, as his success cue demonstrated high competence. It seems likely that designer cloth...

because of how our brains ha...

But we don’t just rely on our own sense of who’s skilful and successful when we work out who to copy. As a highly social, groupish species, we tend to look at who other people consider worthy of attention. We’ll note, for a start, that these men and women have plenty of admirers.

‘Once people have identified a person as worthy of learning from,’

writes Henrich, ‘they necessarily need to be around them, watching, listening and eliciting information through interaction.’ This chosen person, and the people around them, will then begin to show ‘prestige cues’. The chosen person’s body language and speech patterns will show differences. Others will defer to them in myriad ways, conversationally and with eye contact.

One of the more sinister ways we mimic and signal our deference to cultural leaders happens entirely outside of our conscious awareness. The human voice contains a low-frequency vocal band of 500 hertz that was long considered useless because, when the higher frequencies are filtered out, all

that’s left is a deep information-less hum. It’s since been discovered, though, that this hum is actually ‘an unconscious social instrument’. The dominant person in a social situation tends to set the level of the hum and everyone else adjusts theirs to match

it.

We’re naturally attracted to prestige cues, and begin to follow them early.

them. If someone gives

out prestige cues, we’re naturally triggered into this behaviour, especially if that person is part of our perceived in-group. The mind isn’t worried about whether it actually makes sense – whether this person’s sphere of excellence is actually useful in judging the product they happen

to be selling – it’s just a dumb mechanism picking up on ...

All of this leads to a phenomenon that’s sometimes known as the ‘Paris Hilton effect’. Because we’re wired to direct our attention towards the people who are already the subject of attention, we’ll sometimes be drawn to people in the media without really knowing why. But our being drawn to them makes the media focus on them even more. We then attend to them more, then the media attends to them more, and then there’s a run...

So we copy people. We’re ...

drawn to them. We identify the ones who seem to know best how to get along and get ahead, we watch them, we listen to them, we open our selves to their influence. And then we’ll often i...

become absorbed into our model of the perfect self. They are now part of us. A...

We’ve learned already that the mind makes us the hero of our lives. But heroes do things. To make a successful story, a self needs a mission. It needs a plot.

One clever study saw 409 people stripped of their phones and left alone in a room, for up to fifteen minutes, with nothing to do – except use a machine to give themselves electric shocks that were so painful, participants said they’d pay money not to experience them again. 67 per cent of men and 25

per cent of woman were sufficiently discomforted by this they began shocking themselves. The researchers concluded, ‘Most people seem to prefer to be doing something rather than nothing,

even if that something is...

It seems brain and body respond in positive ways when we are actively making progress with our lives, pursuing the plots that give them meaning. The neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky has argued that the brain’s dopamine reward system, which guides our behaviour by giving us little druggy hits of pleasure, is more active not when we seize the prize that we’re after, but when we’re in pursuit of it. Meanwhile, work by geneticist Professor Steve Cole and his colleagues is beginning to suggest that our physical health might improve – risk of heart disease and neurodegen...

called eudaemonic happiness. ‘It’s kind of striving after a noble goal,’ he told me. ‘So it’s heroic behaviour in a literary sense?’ I said. ‘Right. Exactly,’ he said. Further studies have found that people with a greater sense of purpose, and more likely to agree with statements such as, ‘Some people wander aimlessly through life, but I am not one of them,’ actu...

These goals that we purposefully pursue have been the subject of many decades of research by the psychologist Professor Brian Little. He calls them ‘personal projects’ and has examined tens of thousands of them in thousands of participants. He’s discovered that people are typically engaged in around fifteen at any one time. Whether they be mundane, such as teach...

believes they’re so essential to our sense of self that they actually are our self. ‘In many respects we are our personal projects,’ he told me. ‘We are the things we’re doing.’ Little has found that in order to bring us happiness, a project should n...

it. Traditionally, heroes in fictional stories are ultimately successful in their struggles to get what they want, ...

In order to be happy, then, we really ought to be living our lives as story. We should have a goal and feel like we’re at least somewhat successful in our pursuit

of it. Suicide is what happens when the progress halts, robbing us of our hero status.

‘What are these “procedures” for friction?’ ‘Well, to take an example, if you see a senior member of the community is angry with you, then you’ve to go flat, prostrate in front of him. You have to take the initiative and do something placatory, even though he’s the one

that’s annoyed.’ ‘You’re subsuming your ego?’ ‘That’s right, yes,’ he said. ‘Then of course there’s a whole disciplinary thing. The Rule sets out what you do for certain misdemeanours during worship and that’s carried on today in most monasteries. It’s a structure of asking you to humiliate yourself, as it were, to acknowledge that you were a wrongdoer. If you make a mistake, you have to kneel down. You’re apologizing to the Lord but you’re also acknowledging your neighbour, who you’ve irritated.

You see, you take yourself with you wherever you go. You can’t leave yourself behind. The whole of the monastic life is like a hospital, trying to

heal these defects of character.’ So these monks had dedicated their lives to the pursuit of the perfect self just as the Greeks had – it’s just that they differed in their understanding of what the ‘perfect self’ was and how you should get it. For the Greeks, the inherently valuable individual strove to become perfect in order to win prizes, fame and boons for the community. The Christians had taken that struggle and turned it inwards. For them, it wasn’t about Olympic glory or being the greatest potter, or the highest leaper of bulls, it was about a continual battle – with prayer, self-denial, flagellation – to make their inner selves better. What the Christians had added was interiority. Becoming a hero, now, meant being perfect inside and out.

This is where low self-esteem gets built into the core of the machine. For Aristotle, a person had innate potential and was naturally moving towards pe...

when we struggle to improve ourselves, in some way, we often frame it as a battle with our faulty inner selves. We talk of our failures as our ‘demons’, who are part of us, and who we must fight. By my fault, by my fault, by my very great fault . . . None of which is to say that the Greeks had no interest in moral goodness, of course, or that there were no medieval Christians who wanted to better their economic circumstances (indeed, the monasteries were pioneers of an embryonic form of capitalism). But it was a shift in emphasis – and a major one. It changed who we thought we were, who we wanted to be, and the method by which we got there, for ever.

As the social scientist Professor Rodney Stark has observed, where the Qur’an confidently asserted itself to be ‘the Scripture whereof there is no doubt’, St Paul admitted that ‘our knowledge is imperfect and our prophesying is imperfect’. That meant that, in order to really understand what God wanted, we had to analyse and reanalyse and then argue about the disciples’ recollections. In the fifth century, St Augustine wrote that Christians should ‘approach together unto the words of Thy book, and seek in them Thy meaning’. The idea was that the truth was buried in there, somewhere, and that the more we studied, the more we’d reveal. Writes Stark, ‘From the early days, the Church fathers

taught that reason was the supreme gift from God and the means to progressively increase their understanding of scripture and revelation. Consequently, Christianity was oriented to the future, while other major religions asserted the superiority of the past.’ This is why Islam and Judaism are known as ‘orthoprax’ religions: they’re concerned with following the letter of the written Holy law; with correct (orth) practice (praxis). Christianity, meanwhile, is ‘orthodox’, concerned with correct (orth) opinion (dox). It could hardly be more Greek.

Although, it should go without saying, there are notable exceptions on all sides (there are Christians, for instance, who believe the Bible to be the literal word of God. We call them creationists. They’re not people who could comfortably be described as ‘future-orientated’), the emphasis, according to Stark, was...

how these define the relationship between human ...

In place of learning and reciting holy law, Christian preachers are more likely to use excerpts from scripture to construct an argument about right and wrong. The priest, the vicar, the pastor, up there in the pulpit, is Aristotle in the Lyceum, using debate to reveal deeper truth. It was this faith in the struggle of reason to make a be...

For thinkers like Aristotle, the ultimate point of self-pursuit was that a person would be of more value to their community.

If who we are is, to a significant extent, our culture, and if that culture is partly composed of the arguments, discoveries, feuds, prejudices and mistakes of dead men and women, then those arguments, discoveries, feuds, prejudices and mistakes live on, in some form, inside of us. We’ve internalized them. They’ve changed who we are. They’re recorded in our brains as patterns of synaptic connections. They are us.

‘Like Oedipus we live in ignorance of these wishes, repugnant to morality, which have been forced upon us by Nature, and after their revelation we may all of us well seek to close our eyes to the scenes of our childhood.’ *

In his assumption that he was just like everyone else, and everyone else was just like him, Freud was not alone. It’s well known by modern psychologists that most people tend to significantly over estimate the extent to which

others share their feelings and beliefs. Professor Nicholas E...

‘When others’ minds are unknown,’ writes Epley, ‘the mind you imagine is heavily based on your own.’

But with this very ordinary error, Freud managed to redefine our concept of original sin. With our ‘wishes, repugnant to morality . . . forced upon us by nature’, he theorized that much of humanity’s inner misery came, not from the Devil’s temptations, but from the monstrous urges that we repress. After studying neurology, Freud had the world-changing insight that much of human behaviour appears to be out of a person’s conscious control. This was the perfect message for its time. During the nineteenth century, people had become entranced by scientific discoveries that were unveiling hidden worlds. They were learning about genes, bacteria and evolution – unseen forces in the air and

For Freud the job of the psychoanalyst, this new form of priest, was to unbury the unseen forces that live within us and bring them into consciousness. ‘Freud saw the analyst as an Oedipus figure: a seeker of self-knowledge and knowledge of ...

both Ancient Greece and Rome had undergone a ‘renaissance’ that would eventually begin pulling the Western self out of its fug. It’s not a coincidence, of course, that this renaissance was centred in a place and time that also saw radical changes in how we got along and got ahead. It was in the mighty trading hubs of Genoa, Florence and Venice – glorious centres of hustle and thought that can’t help bringing to mind Ancient Greece’s ‘civilization of cities’ – that modern capitalism was born, with its debts, credits, powerful bankers and paper money. The Renaissance aside, most histories would mark the break between Christianity and the discovery of the unconscious as a time of revolution.

This,

after all, was the beginning of the age of modern psychology. But for me, although Freud and his colleagues prepared essential ground for the next chapter in the story of the Western self, theirs only really constitutes a shift in perspective. Humans were still bad. They still needed to be fixed. The cure remained an eternal war with the inner self, which was morally polluted, purely by dint of birth. Freud was really just a self-hating, sex-afeared, secular reinvention of St Benedict. The actual revolution happened out west, in the United States of America. It was there that our view of who we are, and how we ought to be, underwent a true metamorphosis and gained an armoury of new characteristics, a great many of which we still carry with us to...