Culture
Lily Allen & the Gen-Y Condition
Dec 3rd
Many Americans haven’t heard of the young Gen-Y pop singer Lily Allen, but my British compatriots tell me she’s huge in the UK–right up there with that other poster girl for the state of our generation, Amy Winehouse. I discovered her a few months ago and still find her song, “The Fear,” simultaneously highly catchy and slightly disturbing. See the lyrics here. Check it out below:
Lily Allen – The Fear from Alex Gilbert on Vimeo.
(If you can’t play this vid in your country, try searching your local YouTube affiliate.)
YouTube, MySpace and the future of OurSpace
Nov 12th
I often find myself in a state of awe over the wonders of modern technology—video chatting with friends halfway around the globe, exploring slot canyons in Utah with GoogleMaps and having instant answers to nearly any question on Wikipedia—it’s just amazing! But, with all the increased connection, education and enjoyment that have come with modern media, a lot of challenges have come with it as well.
Chief among them is that modern media has conditioned us to think that we’re a lot better and more important than we actually are. Just think about the psychology induced by youTube. With a webcam, a couple minutes and a few clicks you can get thousands of people to watch you—not because you’re an impressive filmmaker or because you’ve achieved something significant—but merely because you had that webcam, used those minutes and made those clicks. And then there’s Facebook, where you’ve got all your friends on your scoreboard, you’re featured in the news everyday, and you’re constantly being updated when anyone does anything in relation to you. Our interactions with such mediums consciously and unconsciously shape who we are. In the words of NYU professor Thomas de Zengotita (he’s also author of the brilliant book Mediated), modern media has given each of us our own little “MeWorld” in which you are always the star, even if your aren’t one. Read the rest of this entry »
Are You a Narcissist?
Jul 6th
I recently interviewed San Diego State University psychology professor Jean M. Twenge about her new book, The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement. The book is quite an achievement and deserves all of the attention it’s been getting from Newsweek and other media outlets. Bringing together an overwhelming amount of evidence from recent psychological research and pop cultural observations, Twenge creates a pretty solid case for the fact that the tendency toward self-obsession, overconfidence, and downright self-centeredness that was born out of the 1960s emphasis on the liberation of the individual has reached epidemic proportions. And as Twenge says, we’ve taken this hard-won individualism, which has brought so many important benefits to society, a bit too far. You can listen to a clip of the interview below.
Read the rest of this entry »
“Is Narcissism Hurting America?”: Stephen Colbert pegs our postmodern disease
Apr 2nd
Narcissism–our postmodern cultural epidemic–is finally getting some press.
For anyone interested in spiritual evolution, narcissism has always been the issue at hand. As spiritual teacher and visionary Andrew Cohen explains:
“[Narcissism] basically means we see life and all of our experience through the prism of the separate ego. The way narcissism works is that the event of experience itself automatically creates, at a subtle level, the sense of being special—any experience at all. The experience itself, whatever it may be, is not a problem—the problem is what the ego does with it.”
And in our postmodern era, that separate, special, sense of self has become more inflamed than ever. As a 1979 baby, I grew up fully in this cultural milieu–a culture where your own feelings and experiences become the “great story,” your life’s guiding principle. Duty, religion, family, country–moral structures that have held society together for centuries–have all, to a great extent, become submerged in the anoxic swamp waters of a “my way or the highway” philosophy.
Beyond the spiritually aware pioneers, narcissism as a culturally recognized disease has not had much attention until recently. We had some early warning signals, such as when Christopher Lasch published a book called “The Culture of Narcissism” in 1979, or when the next year, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders first recognized the emergence of “narcissistic personality disorder”. But even as late as 2006, when Time magazine awarded “You” the Person of the Year award, the irony was lost on the masses. With a reflective cover, the magazine officially made gazing at your image culturally approved–no more mocking that “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all” business (circa 1938).
“This is the cultural moment of the narcissist.” –Emily Yoffe, Slate magazine
Then recently, Slate came out with an article entitled “But Enough About You … What is narcissistic personality disorder, and why does everyone seem to have it?”. The Slate article documents some recent accusations that it was America’s and Wall Street’s narcissism that got us into this financial crisis. They quote the researchers Jean Twenge (author of Generation Me) and Keith Campbell, for some scientific backup:
“Psychologists Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell, authors of The Narcissism Epidemic, who obviously have a stake in proving there is one, estimate around 10 percent of today’s young people have clinical manifestations of NPD. They believe narcissism is a cultural virus that has spread throughout the population over the past several decades.”
But the real coup d’etat was Steven Colbert’s performance on his wildly popular late night comedy show, The Colbert Report (narcissism intentional). Enjoy!
Clip #1:
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Me Time – American Narcissism | ||||
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Clip #2:
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Me Time – Emily Yoffe on Narcissistic Personality Disorder | ||||
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(We apologize to our non-U.S. visitors for your inability to view this clip!)
Out of the Swamp Radio Show – 2/20/09
Feb 26th
Here’s the latest episode from our weekly Friday morning spot on Burlington, Vermont’s “Howie Rose Show”:
Right-click here to download mp3.
And here are some thoughts about the show:
One benefit of our Burlington Radio Show on Friday mornings is that we are starting to bring out and make objective the strands of postmodern culture that shape our ideas, values, and actions, but that we aren’t necessarily aware of. One of these maxims that came out on last Friday’s call was our dependence on balance as a guiding principle–and how diametrically opposed balance and evolution can be.
We spoke about two of the sacred balancing cows of our generation: the balancing of masculine and feminine energy and the quest to balance humanity with our collective impact on the earth. The all too familiar idea is that the world has gotten out of balance due to our over emphasis on industry, consumerism, masculinity, and other modern sins. Now we need to (continue to) restore the balance by bringing in the opposite of those energies–local economy, living simply, femininity, and others.
That the world is suffering from ecological and cultural disasters is not in doubt. Thank God that movements to protect the environment, bring equality, respect cultures and peoples have become part of our value set! These are all movements that I have been part of, as most of us have, to some degree or another. I remember long nights sorting waste in my college’s Physical Plant to determine how many pounds of recyclables were getting tossed by careless college brats. Ahhh, the crusade against the non-recycling hold-outs was a Holy War and I was Earth’s knight in shining armor. With my Nalgene full of superiority juice, my friends and I would snatch discarded plastic bottles out of the trash cans and pile them into the recycling bins, glaring with contempt at the evil sinners–our dorm room neighbors–who we condemned as consciously plotting to destroy the world.
The desire to push back against the problems created by the previous generation’s stunning scientific, economic, and political development was very strong. But that structure of pushing back against progress, (in its own context, modernism IS progressive, least we forget), is in danger of getting in the way now that we are poised to move into a new stage of creative explosion. In this conversation, we are talking about aligning with the universe’s creative energy, as ourselves, a leap forward that will throw anyone off balance. I wonder if it isn’t the knee-jerk attachment to balance in life that is holding us to our postmodern moorings. Perhaps we need to speak about the fact that moving forward into a new value-sphere doesn’t mean giving up the good postmodern values– they will always be part of us. It means giving up our attachment to them, at the expense of adopting new ones.
We are talking about what comes next. As Diane so aptly put on the show (see audio, above), we are talking about the move from postmodern to an evolutionary worldview, not from modern to postmodern.
Looking forward to more!
Everything’s Amazing; Nobody’s Happy
Feb 24th
A friend sent me a link to this incredibly funny, insightful, and implicating video clip of stand-up comedian Louis CK appearing on Late Night with Conan O’Brien giving some examples of the extraordinary irony of our time: everything’s amazing and yet no one is happy. Check it out!!
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