The Inner Level

by Richard Wilkinson

  Twenge, Campbell and their colleagues drew together eighty-five studies that had used the Narcissistic Personality Inventory in samples of the American population between 1982 and 2006.121 They found a steep rise in narcissism over that period – 30 per cent more people showed narcissistic tendencies in 2006 than in 1982. Given the relationship between self-enhancement and inequality, and the evidence that a defensive self-esteem contributes to narcissism, we expected narcissism to reflect changes in inequality. The period in which Twenge found a steep rise in narcissism was also a period which saw substantial rises in income differences in the USA. In Figure 3.2 we plot both trends together, using income inequality data from the World Top Incomes Database.122

  We had predicted that narcissism and self-enhancement would be related to greater inequality because inequality makes social status more important. Where some people are ‘worth’ so much more than others, we judge each other more by status. Narcissism is the sharp end of the struggle for social survival against self-doubt and a sense of inferiority. It is a reaction to the same kind of environment that produces social anxiety, shyness and lack of confidence. Twenge and Campbell write that competition and status-seeking have increased in American society, along with ‘a growing perception that people have to claw their way up, or risk being mired in poverty’.119 The connection between inequality and narcissism is supported by research on how growing up poor is associated with status-seeking, and growing up wealthy with narcissism. Feeling wealthy, self-identifying as rich and having a higher income have all been associated with a higher likelihood of being narcissistic. Using data collected from active soldiers in the United States Army, Sean Martin of Boston College and his colleagues found that parental income was positively related to later narcissism.124 Soldiers from wealthier families were more likely to agree that they were ‘special because everyone keeps telling me so’ and that ‘group activities tend to be dull without me’.

  Figure 3.2: College students’ Narcissistic Personality Inventory scores over time appear to reflect the rise in US income inequality.123

  Another sign of the connection between rising inequality and people’s desire for status comes from survey data showing the rise in the income levels people aspire to. In the decade from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, as income inequality rose steeply, the incomes people thought they would need to fulfil their dreams doubled, from $50,000 to $102,000.125

  Twenge and her colleagues have compared the attitudes and goals of different generations at the same age, including ‘Baby Boomers’ (born 1946–1961), those in ‘Generation X’ (born 1962–1981) and ‘Millennials’ (born after 1982). Those born later thought that money, image and fame were more important, and self-acceptance, affiliation and community were less important. Over time, and in years with higher income inequality, wanting to make money was a more important motivation for going to college than wanting to gain an appreciation of ideas.126, 127

  Faced with an increased social evaluation threat stemming from greater inequality, we are all between a rock and a hard place – succumbing to anxiety and depression, or attempting to claw our way up via self-enhancement or narcissism. Just how intense the conflict is between these two alternatives is shown by the frequency with which people suffering from conditions such as schizophrenia or the manic phase of bipolar disorder, develop delusions of grandeur. As many as half of those with these conditions come to believe they actually are famous celebrities, political or religious leaders or the CEOs of major multinational corporations. While these delusions appear to provide a defence against low self-esteem and depression, the adoption of an illusory identity is a high price to pay to resolve the conflict between the desire for fame and fortune and the shortcomings of reality.

  RESHAPING OURSELVES

  Some of the characteristics of narcissism include self-obsession, the need for constant attention and flattery from others, and having unrealistic fantasies of success, beauty or romance. So as status anxiety and competition drive increases in narcissism, we not only see our temperament, personality, success, etc. through each other’s eyes, we’re also more likely to compare our bodies with others’, worry about how they see us, and confuse how we look with personal worth.

  Journalist Leora Tanenbaum has described how women undertake cosmetic surgery to erase the ‘flaws’ they perceive in their faces and bodies, so that they can fit in with a limited, supposed ideal, of how a woman should look.128 Plastic surgery has its roots in the nineteenth century, when Jewish men tried to eliminate racialized facial characteristics to escape discrimination in their business and professional lives. The power of contemporary pressure on women to conform is in some ways not dissimilar: the images of women that we are all bombarded by every day, whether in magazines, advertisements, films, on television or the catwalk, suggest that women need to conform to the ideal and self-enhance to be valued. The effect of these pressures becomes clear as soon as girls reach puberty. The Millennium Cohort Study found that the proportion of girls in the UK with emotional problems – as reported by their parents – rises from 12 per cent among eleven-year-olds to 18 per cent among fourteen-year-olds. When, at the age of fourteen, children reported their own symptoms, 24 per cent of girls said they suffered from depression.129

  Men are not immune either. In movies, TV shows, music videos and men’s magazines, the ideal man is broad shouldered, sculpted and muscular. Just as women have been pressured by idealized images of female beauty on billboards and screens, now men are also constantly confronted with larger-than-life images of washboard abs and bulging biceps, whether it’s underwear or cars that are on sale. The pressure on men to look fit is reflected in the vast amount of shelving given over to bodybuilding supplements in ordinary supermarkets, the rise of eating disorders among men, and increasing numbers of men waxing, bleaching, using Botox and undergoing other cosmetic procedures. As the tabloids put it, it’s as difficult to look like Ken as it is to look like Barbie.130

  In 2013, almost 2 million Americans had plastic surgery, and around 14 million had non-invasive cosmetic procedures, such as Botox injections or wrinkle fillers.131 Most popular were breast augmentation, nose reshaping, eyelid surgery, liposuction and facelifts. Among the procedures growing fastest in popularity were breast lifts (up 70% since 2000), tummy tucks (up 79%), buttock lifts (up 80%), lower body lifts (up 3417%) and upper arm lifts (up 4565%). A different professional association – the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery – adds labiaplasty (reshaping the folds of skin surrounding the vulva) as an increasingly fashionable operation.132 In the same year in the UK, 50,000 cosmetic surgeries were performed, with breasts, noses, eyelids and faces the most popular areas for correction, just as in the USA.133 Liposuction procedures, the sucking out of excess fat, rose over 40 per cent in just that one year.

  Should these statistics worry us? Perhaps going under the knife, or allowing yourself to be injected with toxins, reflects a reduced stigma around such interventions, and more people choosing to fulfil a healthy desire to look the way they want. A study published in 2012 suggests not, however.134 It followed teenage girls in Norway for thirteen years, collecting information on their satisfaction with their appearance, their mental health and their use of cosmetic surgery. Symptoms of depression and anxiety, a history of self-harming, feeling suicidal and illegal drug use were predictive of those young women choosing to have cosmetic surgery. Young women who had surgery during the study period had an increase in symptoms of depression and anxiety, eating problems and alcohol use compared to those who didn’t have surgery. An earlier American study showed that cosmetic surgery patients were five times more likely to have a history of psychiatric illness, compared to patients having other surgery; in fact, 18 per cent of the cosmetic surgery patients were using psychiatric medications at the time of their surgical consultation.135 Trends in cosmetic surgery are not something we should be complacent about, as they are so clearly a reflection of insecurity, anxiety and unhappiness. And if t
his is about social comparisons it is surely a zero-sum game – we can’t all look more attractive compared to each other.

  FEELING SPECIAL

  Let’s return to the issue of whether or not it’s important to love and feel good about ourselves. Don’t we need to do this in order to feel confident, to get ahead, to have the courage to ‘make something of ourselves’?

  The reaction to Twenge and Campbell’s work in America was mostly positive, but they describe receiving some ‘harsh criticism’, as those immured in the cult of self-esteem and positive thinking asked ‘should we all just hate ourselves instead?’ One student protested in the media: ‘But we are special. There’s nothing wrong with knowing that. It’s not vanity that this generation exhibits – it’s pride.’ Nobody likes to be accused of self-centredness, and research shows that young people especially dislike being labelled as entitled and narcissistic, even as they admit to being a more narcissistic generation than their parents.136

  As Twenge and her co-authors point out, narcissists lack empathy, which in the long-term means they have difficulty maintaining mutually loving relationships and friendships. They also show that there isn’t a correlation between narcissism and performance on intelligence tests, that narcissists are no more physically attractive than non-narcissists, and narcissism does not lead to sustained success. Narcissists are more likely to drop out of college, have too high a tolerance for risk in business, are unpopular as bosses, and work poorly in groups. Narcissists aren’t really better than the rest of us; their admiration for themselves isn’t based on real qualities or achievements, and their behaviour can cause real suffering to their family, friends and colleagues. Narcissism is another consequence of the ‘each against all’ logic, of the way inequality replaces co-operation with status competition.

  PSYCHOPATHS AT THE TOP

  All societies like to think of themselves as ones in which honest, law-abiding, hard-working citizens can make a living, contribute to society and find fulfilment. We expect our institutions – whether schools, businesses or governments – to reward moral, ethical behaviour, hard work and co-operation. However, inequality and the heightened status competition and individualism which go with it seem to contribute to a culture in which ‘greed is good’, risk-taking is admired, and the differences between overly dominant behaviour and leadership are elided.

  In such a climate, it is perhaps no wonder that individuals with a personality disorder characterized by lying, manipulation, deceit, egocentricity and callousness can often be found at the very top of modern corporate structures. Psychologists Paul Babiak and Robert Hare call this phenomenon ‘snakes in suits’, documenting how ‘snakes’ with psychopathic personalities have thrived, at the expense of others, in the fast-paced, competitive world of modern business corporations.137

  Greater inequality not only causes psychopathic tendencies to manifest in more people, it provides the cut-throat environment in which those tendencies come to be seen as admirable or valuable, and competitiveness as more important than co-operation. The idea that the upper reaches of the business world are increasingly peopled by those with psychopathic tendencies has caught the attention of psychologists and the public alike. Journalist Jon Ronson’s 2011 book, The Psychopath Test,138 describes how he learned to spot psychopaths, applying Robert Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist. A diagnosis of psychopathy depends on a high score on this checklist rather than on having every single characteristic; so it doesn’t depend on having a criminal record or a history of behavioural problems in childhood. It is plausible, therefore, that in a culture that values some expressions of some of these behaviours, people with more of these traits might do rather well, at least in the short-term.

  Ronson recounts his meeting with Al Dunlap, a former CEO of Sunbeam-Oster, a US firm that made electrical home appliances such as toasters and waffle irons. Dunlap was known as a business turnaround specialist and professional downsizer; according to Wikipedia, he was known as ‘Chainsaw Al’ and ‘Rambo in Pinstripes’ for his ruthless methods. Despite some initial reluctance, Dunlap agreed during their meeting to go through Hare’s revised Psychopathy Checklist with Ronson. He agreed that many of the items applied to him, but saw them as positives. He claimed to be ‘totally charming’, saw grandiose self-worth as important – ‘you’ve got to believe in yourself’ – and saw manipulation as ‘leadership’:

  And so the morning continued, with Al redefining a great many psychopathic traits as Leadership Positive. Impulsivity was ‘just another way of saying Quick Analysis. Some people spend a week weighing up the pros and cons. Me? I look at it for ten minutes. And if the pros outweigh the cons? Go!’ ‘Shallow affect’ stops you from feeling ‘some nonsense emotions’. A lack of remorse frees you up to move forward and achieve more great things.138

  Over lunch, Dunlap tells Ronson supposedly funny stories about firing people, his wife laughing at each one, and Ronson speculates on ‘what a godsend to a corporation a man who enjoys firing people must be’.

  Of course, Dunlap wasn’t a godsend to many of the long-term and loyal employees of Sunbeam-Oster. Widespread plant and factory closures and mass firings might have been popular with shareholders, but they caused enormous human suffering and devastated many small-town economies. And in the long-term, Sunbeam-Oster itself suffered badly from Dunlap’s grandiose sense of self-worth, cunning and criminal versatility – he used fraudulent accounting methods to make shareholders believe that the company had been turned around and was making huge profits. He was sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2001, and in 2002 Sunbeam-Oster filed for bankruptcy. Closer investigation showed that he had a history of such irregularities and of being fired for his aggressive management style. John Byrne, the editor of business magazine Fast Company who wrote a book about Dunlap, claimed never to have come across an executive as ‘manipulative, ruthless, and destructive as Al Dunlap’.139

  Is Dunlap a bad apple, one of a very few? Are there really more psychopaths at the top of the corporate world than lower down the ranks? British psychologists Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon compared the personality traits of 39 senior business managers (all men) to a sample of 768 patients from Broadmoor High Security Hospital. All of the Broadmoor patients had received a legal classification of either mental illness or psychopathic disorder and either been convicted of serious crime or found unfit to plead when tried for such crimes.140 The businessmen scored higher than the diagnosed patients on several negative traits, including histrionic (superficial charm, insincerity, egocentricity, manipulativeness), narcissistic (grandiosity, lack of empathy, exploitativeness, independence), and compulsive (perfectionism, excessive devotion to work, rigidity, stubbornness and dictatorial tendencies) features.

  In Chapter 2, Figure 2.4 showed how people can be classified along two dimensions of behaviour: between dominance and submissiveness and between warmth and hostility – people with narcissistic and psychopathic tendencies are in the top right quarter of the diagram, where dominance and hostility meet. Whether they achieve success through manipulative and ruthless business practices or end up in prison for violent and aggressive offences, may depend in large part on whether chance landed them in family and social circumstances that enabled them to climb up the ladder of business – snakes in suits – or whether poverty and difficult early circumstances hampered their ability to avoid aggression, and they ended up at the bottom.

  Babiak and Hare describe the corporate climate that developed in the USA in the late 1970s as one of takeovers, mergers and acquisitions, downsizing and break-ups, the shedding of bureaucracy, rapid change, speed and innovation. What was lost was an appreciation of corporate or institutional loyalty, and the social contract between employer and employee, between business and society. This transformation of business was a consequence of the political and economic ideologies of the time. The belief in unfettered individualism and free markets also marked the onset of the widening of income differences and the rise of status comp
etition throughout society. In fact, so closely do modern corporations resemble the narcissistic and psychopathic individuals they often embrace that there is a full-length 2003 documentary feature film about this, The Corporation, based on a book by law professor Joel Bakan.141 Corporations have gone from being legal institutions with public functions, to having the legal rights of personhood, giving them some of the rights of individual humans (including making political expenditures). Bakan therefore examines the corporate structure as a personality – and diagnoses it as psychopathic. In 2003 this could be seen as darkly humorous, but since the global financial crisis of 2007–8, book after book, and films such as The Four Horsemen and Inside Job, have traced the damage caused to millions worldwide by the corporate risk-takers and socially irresponsible rogue businesses.

  Philosopher Simon Blackburn, discussing rising inequality and the vast salaries and bonuses of the top 1 per cent in his extended essay on self-love, Mirror, Mirror, asks: ‘How can they look [at] themselves in the mirror, walk down the street? Have they no sense of decency, let alone fellow feeling with the rest, whom they have robbed and continue to rob?’142 The answer, as he goes on to discuss, is that such people have come to believe that they are ‘worth it because of their exceptional abilities, judgement and intelligence. Anything less than, say, 300 times the average income of workers in their companies would be unjust, a simple failure to reward their astonishing gifts adequately.’ Never mind, points out Blackburn, that it requires no extraordinary genius to pay bank customers 1 per cent interest, lend to borrowers at 16.5 per cent interest, and pocket as much of the difference as they can get away with.