The developed world is filling up with cute trophy kids with self-esteem that is sky-high. They have no skills, competencies, or achievements to speak of. But they’ve always been told by their parents how special and how smart they are — why, “you can do anything you set your mind to, you’re so special!”
And so we are filling up schools and universities with narcissists and self-centered sociopaths who expect the world to be handed to them on a platter — but who on their own will never amount to anything.
In the old days, kids had to actually win a competition to get a trophy or a medal. Today’s trophy kids just have to show up and look cute. Their parents will make sure they get a trophy. No rites of passage for these special little things.
Kids don’t know any better. If their parents groom them for narcissism, their trajectories are set — unless a spoiler arrives on the scene in the nick of time to upset carefully laid plans.
An obsession with image, a constant concern with how one is perceived, has the effect of turning life into a performance, demoting others to the role of mere spectators. Nothing is genuine or sincere or authentic, but instead everything is done for the sake of the impression it creates on others. Everybody is Willy Loman, worried about being “well-liked.”
To hell with all that. Life as an endless high-school popularity contest is only interesting to people whose egos are so badly damaged they are consumed with a self-hate which they attempt to mask with sociopathic manipulations. They deliberately cause problems and then blame others for the problems they’ve caused, because their entire lives are an evasion of responsibility. They are incapable of recognizing themselves as the source of their own problems, because this would require them to admit error, a recognition of personal shortcoming that their fragile egos could never withstand.
Narcissism Self Esteem
They may be cute, but they are certainly not special. Not a tiny fraction as special as their parents think they are, parents who are too busy grooming sociopathic narcissists to stop and consider what they are doing.
Here’s what a therapist should say: “too perfect” parents who coddle and overprotect their kids aren’t doing it for their kids, they are doing it for themselves, in defense of their own ego; and that, not the bike helmets, is why their kids end up adrift and confused. The problem isn’t that kids are too wussy to go out and play, but that their parents do not trust themselves, their generation (“if I graduated Wellesley and I’m this stressed out, that other mom must be a pedophile”), their impulses and instincts, so kids must be dandelions made of cotton candy in a rainstorm made of lava, which makes no sense yet it makes perfect sense: paranoia. Ego vs. reality, and you can’t appraise either. And then one day your kid is punched by some bully raised by Nascar fans or baby mommas and you shut down the school because you think the problem is the bully. The problem is you. The bully may have punched your Edward in the belly but you mobilized a school district to DEFCON 2, who has more power? Who is the biggest bully?(3)
The problem is you are in therapy not to become better parents or to do better work but to… to what? Do you have any idea?
More than likely kids overcome all this, everybody finds their own way, but to those who feel stuck the only solution is to forsake all attempts at figuring out who you are, conveying who you are– because you aren’t anybody yet– and just accomplish stuff, yet be ready to discover in 50 years that the sum total of your life’s real accomplishments may be very different than what you expected, and it must be enough. In the irreplaceable words of Marshall McLuhan: “there’s nothing God hates more than some mofo with a cable subscription running out the clock.”
Narcissism Creates Narcissism
Look at the antifa/BLM riot generation. The generation of snowflakes and perpetual victims. They were always told how smart and special they were. They were told that they could do anything they wanted with their lives. But that was just a lie their own narcissistic parents told them.
For those who are committed to raising Dangerous Children with broad skills and competencies — who will be able to support themselves financially at least three different ways by the age of eighteen — it just means that skills shortages in the overall population will grow acutely worse. Running a business will get harder because competent employees will get much harder to come by. There are likely to be a lot more protests that turn into riots and city-burning fests, because even young adults with college degrees will be unqualified to do anything else outside the fields of protest, agitation, and “community organizing.”
Which means that deciding where you locate your homes and businesses will become much more important. Think it over. Whatever you do, don’t be part of the problem.
The Dangerous Child 