The Selfishness of Others Quotes

“Vonnegut was talking,” I say today, “about the psychic effects of trauma.” There’s a sentence of Alice Miller’s looping in my mind, about grandiose people and depressives, Narcissus and Echo: “Neither can accept the truth that this loss or absence of love has already happened in the past, and that no effort whatsoever can change this fact.” It’s the main thing I’ve learned from reading all this psychology: the future is always trying to feel like the past. When it does, it feels like selfishness, hurt, loss at the hands of others. The trick is to let it empty. Maybe this is another way to come unstuck in time.”
― Kristin Dombek, The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism

“But the moment you begin to find that the other lacks empathy— when you find him inhuman— is a moment when you can’t feel empathy, either.”
― Kristin Dombek, The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism

“But behind that neat list of narcissistic traits, within psychology’s ever-expanding and dividing fields and schools, the debates continued: How much self-regard is normal, and how much unhealthy or even evil? When someone is acting like a six-year-old, should you empathize with their view of reality or try to correct it? If someone doesn’t want to talk to you or fall in love with you, when is that because he is fundamentally an asshole? If someone turns suddenly away from treatment, or from a relationship, does that mean she is incapable of love? Are there really people who have no empathy? Can you help someone learn to love? And is this thing called narcissism something some people are, or something they do? These are questions you can ask forever, not only if you are a psychologist, but if you find yourself loving someone who turns away.”
― Kristin Dombek, The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism

“It would be wrong to believe,” Girard writes, “that the deceivers at this game are sharply separated from the deceived, that the world is neatly divided between the cold calculators and the innocent dupes. Everybody is a little of both; you must be a dupe of your own comedy to play it with conviction. The romantic and satanic vision of the cold calculator, of the totally lucid manipulator of other people’s desires, is a more sophisticated version of the narcissistic illusion.”
― Kristin Dombek, The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism

“To mourn the absence of affection in someone, to translate their turning away into emptiness, to mistake your own emptiness for theirs, when desire simply makes you feel this way: this is the tragedy Ovid gives us. Is Narcissus the cold, vain beloved, or a portrait of the victim? Ovid has the boy ask us this himself: Is he the lover, or beloved? But”
― Kristin Dombek, The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism

“The irony is that the kind of empathy that many women who believe themselves to be hooked up with narcissists describe themselves as having (calling themselves in contrast to their narcissist an “empath,” a “clairvoyant,” a highly sensitive person) then gets in the way of their understanding the narc at all. And at the other end of the scale, perhaps we are inclined to exaggerate our empathetic abilities when we confront strangers at the pace of the Internet.”
― Kristin Dombek, The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism

“We become selves only by mirroring in ourselves the actions of others, who we want to be like. We are, in this very real, material way, made of each other, and so we exist, Girard argued, not alone, boundaries secured, working out economic exchanges between ourselves and those who we might dare to love, but always somewhere in-between.”
― Kristin Dombek, The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism

“It’s not a crass relativism, Morton’s idea; his point is not that morality and ethics are, or should be, relative to our situation. He is outlining the limitations our fetishizing of empathy causes: the way protecting our image as a moral person can keep us from being exactly who we want to be—good at understanding the world and others, at preventing atrocities, at helping people to heal and change. He’s also suggesting why we do this: in everyday life, in order to get along quickly with others, we need clear distinctions between moral and atrocious acts, without the kind of extensive knowledge of their contexts that it takes to really and deeply understand. And when we begin questioning the centrality and accuracy of our own perspective, searching out the details that matter so we can get a more accurate representation of the other, we find too much similarity, that too many “ordinary actions are continuous with many atrocious ones,” and we can’t function. It is easier to choose to see others as mirrored inversions of our false sense of decency—to imagine that when they do selfish or violent things, it must be decency they abhor. When it speaks through us, sometimes, the narcissism script helps us do this, valorizing closeness and empathy as the ultimate moral good, and as what is increasingly lacking in others, so we can perform astonishment at the boyfriend, Milgram’s subjects, the Nazis, the millennials, the world—in exactly that moment when, if we were to acknowledge the difference in context, we might find too threatening a similarity. In the case of the bad boyfriend, the millennial, and the murderer, it’s not just decency that keeps us from being able to actually understand and feel the other, but our beliefs about the opposition between human and inhuman, and our beliefs about mental “health.” In fact, the mistake the script repeats and repeats—that what is human is the opposite of what is inhuman—may be partly responsible for keeping us, for centuries, from this deeper understanding of what it actually means to do what Morton calls “empathy’s work.” The narcissism of decency, then, does exactly what we decent people fear: it prevents a deep sharing of feeling. But that sharing is the very feeling of being alive, and somewhere on the other side of our everyday moralizing, it is always there.”
― Kristin Dombek, The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism

“The gender of the archetypal narcissist shifts according to who’s got the power of diagnosis, and if there’s one thing a girl with a bad boyfriend has, it’s the moral upper hand in the religion of mental health.”
― Kristin Dombek, The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism

“If Proust is able to pull away the veil of the narcissistic illusion, perhaps it is because he, like any novelist, like Morton, can activate our mirroring, but then slow us down, help us see from more than one position at the same time, move us outward from the center of the world, where we’re stuck, to a kind of categorical empathy, a sympathetic imperative, embodied and interpreted—like waking among a herd of wild horses at the break of day.”
― Kristin Dombek, The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism