Opinion: Putting the kibosh on the other ‘N word’

Professional pundits love it, as do bloggers, politicians, religious leaders, celebrity shrinks, cultural critics, Internet commenters and blowhards at parties. And why shouldn’t we? (Yes, I include myself in this mix; I am, after all, a you-know-what.) It’s the handiest weapon in our arsenal: a derogatory apercu that’s one-size-fits-all. Democrats, Republicans, red state folks, blue state folks, baby boomers, Gen Xers, millennials: all narcissists! Parents, nonparents, vegans, meat eaters, city dwellers, rural dwellers, people who travel a lot, people who refuse to travel, writers who use the first person: all vectors in the national scourge of self-involvement.

Here’s the problem with the charge of narcissism. The term has been misused and overused so flagrantly that it’s now all but meaningless when it comes to labeling truly destructive tendencies. These days, you can be called a narcissist merely by having self-esteem and showing a little ambition — in other words, for trying to survive in the world. In fact, so fluid has the definition become that narcissism’s true home for the last 44 years, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, has dropped the diagnosis from its roster.

As for anyone still itching to attribute our collective addiction to Facebook and e-mail and other self-referential forms of communication to a narcissism epidemic, I beg to differ. That stuff hasn’t made us into egomaniacs; it’s made us into boring, semi-verbal zombies who bang into each other when we exit movie theaters because we’re buried in our iPhones.