Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us

by Will Storr

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.’

The effect of our tribal brains has been shown in numerous experiments by social psychologists, who’ve found that all you have to do to generate spontaneous prejudice and bias in humans is to randomly divide one group of them into two.

Christianity seemed to have brought with it a feeling of self-hatred, a fetishization of low self-esteem.

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 perfection. But for the Christians, a person was born in a state of sin and falling towards hell.

It was feared the future would be a ‘technocracy’ in which freedom and individuality would be crushed and the population dominated by machines of coercion, conformity and control. Computers were seen as a war technology that would be co-opted by the collective powers of government and corporation and used against us.

Connected to this ‘you are not our responsibility’ corporate mindset is our age of perfectionism’s distinctive ‘no-service’ consumer culture, in which we’re increasingly stuck in byzantine call trees, thrown towards volunteer online forums for technical support and checking ourselves into flights and our shopping out of supermarkets – the constant, tedious drip-drip-drips of the market, adding more and more stress and responsibility onto the teetering ‘I’.

‘People are interested in entrepreneurship as a general social value. They’re admiring celebrities for their hustle, avidly following things like which album or movie makes the most money or who’s the most highly paid. There’s a sense you go after corporate money, and that way you’re independent and no one can tell you anything. But what that really means is we’re allowing the norms and values of corporations to dictate how we behave in our daily lives.’

Of course, social media is about more than just appearance. It’s also a deeply neoliberal product that has gamified the self, turning our identity into a pawn that plays competitively on digital platforms for likes, feedback and friends – the approval of the tribe. The

It felt as if, at the heart of all this, there was something inherently narcissistic – that our perspective is so precious we feel justified in silencing or punishing those who don’t share it.

One of the dictums that defines our culture is that we can be anything we want to be – to win the neoliberal game we just have to dream, to put our minds to it, to want it badly enough.

Here’s the truth that no million-selling self-help book, famous motivational speaker, happiness guru or blockbusting Hollywood screenwriter seems to want you to know. You’re limited. Imperfect. And there’s nothing you can do about it.

It’s a great hubris to imagine we have any idea what it’s like to be anyone else.

The first step is to stop believing the tribal propaganda. Once you realize that it’s all just an act of coercion, that it’s your culture trying to turn you into someone you can’t really be, you can begin to free yourself from its demands.

On the contrary, we’re animals but we think we’re not animals.