Welcome to the American Devolution
And with it, the devolution of the West, because, racism, narcissism, and other -isms
The United States is an impossible nation because it is a contradictory nation. It is one where the interests of violent, narcissistic, and racist individuals and their collective individualism outweighs the needs and rights of more than 320 million people. Between the outright dystopian denial of COVID-19 as a leading public health menace since the rise of the Omicron variant at the start of 2022 and the never-ending drumbeat of -isms-fueled mass violence, it is clear the US — and the West with it — is beginning to devolve. Whether this devolution leads to more insurrections, more pandemics, or even a civil war remains to be seen.
It is so clear that in the classes I have taught on US history in the past four years, I have taken to calling this period the US and the world has been in since the early 1970s “the American Devolution.” Some students have audibly gasped at the idea the US has been in decline for at least a half-century. Some deny and deflect while arguing with me about it. Some even defend the US, saying things like “things will get better,” or “you have to have hope,” or “I believe in God,” as if there’s no evidence backing up my interpretation. Also, since it is also written, “Faith without works is dead,” maybe my students should either prove me incorrect with their own evidence or finish my courses determined to ensure a better future for the US and the world? Maybe this, too, is a sign of narcissism, a refusal to embrace reality.
The larger truth is that the US and the West have faced such crises around individualism and narcissism as long as the US and the West have promoted individualism as one of its ideals. The truth is the US and the West have lived with the inherent contradictions between individual freedoms and racial capitalism and racist, sexist, and homophobic violence for more than three centuries. These contradictions are deliberate, and the potential violence they engender deliberate as well.
The US, the West, and the World Health Organization (WHO) have essentially declared the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic over. Governments and news media have focused on “since the pandemic” and “getting back to normal” for the past year instead. The US especially never moved as a nation to maximize the options available for limiting the spread and eventual mutations of the virus at any point. Even at the heights of the pandemic, when 100,000 Americans died nearly every month from the pathogen between November 2020 and March 2021, and again between November 2021 and March 2022, the federal government never nationalized mandatory mask-wearing or mandatory vaccination. Meanwhile, the rich and powerful exercised an abundance of caution against COVID-19 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January 2023, even using ultraviolet lighting to kill the airborne pathogen. But between a new Omicron subvariant emerging every few months and major outbreaks in China, India, and elsewhere, it is apparent COVID-19 is here to stay, with governments no longer willing to protect ordinary citizens from this new disease.
For the past two years, I have confronted the realities of what happens when individualism is allowed to be the default setting of a nation-state in the middle of a public health crisis. Classroom after classroom and week after week, I have taught in college lecture rooms full of undergraduate students who would sooner complain about my description of the US as a “virulently racist society” than wear a mask. Even when the schools for which I have taught had indoor mask mandates, students wore them begrudgingly. They often wore the same mask over and over again, and many often pulled their masks off their faces before they were out the door.
Once college campuses decided in spring 2022 to end indoor mask mandates, students abandoned any pretense at mask-wearing, and scrunched up their faces whenever they saw me masked up. “Masks don’t work,” one student said to me, though she wore her mask “out of respect for you as my professor.” “Why should I have to wear a mask? I mean, you’re wearing a mask, so I don’t have to,” said another student in one of my other courses. Even after asking them to wear them, even after explaining my health status and my wife’s immunocompromised state, only a handful of students acquiesced.
The cost for my students has been to attend classes where nearly 19 out of every 20 of them have been unmasked. At least a quarter of my students have been absent from my courses due to what I called “Voldemort” for their sakes (“the disease that shall not be named”) since 2021, some of them catching it more than once. There are times I have moved my classes from in-person to virtual settings because so many students have been out sick from COVID-19 and other respiratory illnesses (likely made worse by previous bouts with COVID-19) or from Long COVID. Yet time and again, even after their COVID-19 illness, students have come back to my classes unmasked, sometimes within hours of testing negative for the virus for the first time. They have even come up to me to have conversations and chafed when I have asked them to keep that six feet of distance. My colleagues, including some who have caught COVID-19, have done little better, between their scornful stares and only wearing a cloth mask when in my presence, one they haven’t washed since buying it in 2020. This is nasty, and on multiple levels.
Americans tend to defend these kinds of behaviors. The US is a society that rewards individualism and despises communalism, after all, whether in the middle of a pandemic or during less catastrophic times. But there is another word for these behaviors — narcissism. Individualism in a US and Western context is all about independence and self-reliance in the pursuit of prosperity. The problem is within our world of systemic racism and consumer capitalism, a world fueled by an absolute belief in the individual over the collective, the tendency is to ignore communities and eschew the societal greater good. This is especially true when money and profit are involved. This collective narcissism allows so many to erase and ignore others in pain or in danger, a violence both material and psychological in nature.
Jordan Neely’s recent murder on a New York City subway train is but a small example of this erasure and ignorance. Neely’s death was a 15-minute process in which Long Islander Daniel Penny strangled the 30-year-old unhoused Black man (with help from at least one other passenger) for yelling about his predicament, all while passengers either quietly cheered it on or did nothing.
This is not just another 21st-century version of a Black man’s lynching in which most watched while a couple carried out this vicious, murderous deed. It is also a consistent theme for individuals in any society to submerge any belief in the common good when they bear witness, perhaps because they just wanted to get to work or go home drama-free in Neely’s case. Individualism when practiced as a society to ignore entire classes of people is really a collective sort of narcissism. Self-importance at the expense of others, a lack of empathy for others, a sense that others should appreciate and admire them for the positions they take — it likely fits Penny’s view of his murderous intervention — is narcissism, not just individualism. It has all manifested in the way my anti-masking students and colleagues have been toward each other and toward me the past two years, and in the ways straphangers ignore and even help the mentally ill and unhoused die painful deaths.
But individualism-as-narcissism has always been central to the American id, especially in its ultimate expression in racism and in racial capitalism. What a nation of narcissists will never understand — and will never desire to understand — is that racism in all forms is fundamentally about controlling the bodies, labor, and resources of people those desiring power and wealth see as expendable. Although it is often expressed in violence — and these days, in the forms of police lethality, white vigilantism, and mass shootings — direct violence is only the tip of an enormous latticework of systemic racism. Racist hatred is not necessary to maintain racism at an individual or systemic level. The focus on racist hatred itself is narcissistic. It serves as a distraction to ultimately leave the vast majority of people benefitting from racism outside of the realm of racism’s practitioners.
Yet, just like with the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, many of my students also refuse to understand the connections between systemic racism, individual racism, and narcissism as a psychological wage gained from racism. Like most Americans and Westerners, for them, racism at the level of the individual is often seen as either a white person who is a card-carrying member of the KKK or as a deranged white American spewing the n-word frequently enough to be caught in public doing so. It is not the standard white American or white-adjacent person who walks around with a miles-long list of assumptions about those who are Black, Brown, and Indigenous. These presumptions provide tens of millions with what the great Black intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois would call a psychological wage of white-based superiority in their interactions throughout life.
My students and many of my colleagues see racist, misogynistic, and queerphobic mass shooters like Dylann Roof, Patrick Wood Crusius, Payton S. Gendron, Salvador Gomez, and Mauricio Garcia as mere aberrations. Even mentioning the latest shooting at a university, a school, a shopping mall, a church or synagogue or mosque during a class lecture or discussion often leads to barely audible sighs, eyes glazed over, and blank stares. They believe (like many news reports declare) that white supremacy is an extremist ideology on the fringes of society embraced only by the most narcissistic of Americans. They refuse to accept that individualism-as-narcissism-as-enhanced-through-racism not only allows for such ideas and violence to flourish. These mechanisms have always allowed what otherwise should be fringy ideas to be very much mainstream, not just in recent times, but all through American history and the modern history of the West. The genocide of Indigenous people the world over was a normal part of the colonization process. The enslavement of African people was a normal part of the process of capitalism and industrialization in the US and in the Western Hemisphere. Surely the mass violence and the mass suffering of the 21st century cannot just be the preference of a few violent white and white-adjacent men.
As the US and the West have embraced individualism over the centuries, they have privileged those who benefit the most from this worldview. The US and the West is where narcissism and people who have narcissistic tendencies are normalized. Everyday narcissism is so normal from a societal perspective that it is doubtful that most social psychologists or sociologists see or sense it, only looking for the most malignant narcissists in a society where narcissism is the actual norm.
There was never a need for Osama bin Laden or Al Qaeda or any other international terrorist group to plan some elaborate attack on the US or in Europe. They and my students never understood that the narcissism and the racism the US and the West harbors through their blind commitment to individualism needed no help from them in terrorizing and imploding nation-states, that unchecked individualism alone would do the trick. It’s not just individuals like Brenton Harrison Tarrant in Christchurch, New Zealand, or Tobias Rathjen in Hanau, Germany, or Anders Behring Breivik in Norway, with their racist and Islamophobic manifestos and violent acts of domestic terrorism. In the past 160 years in the US alone, there has been civil war, assassins have murdered four US presidents, and there’s been one direct attempt at insurrection in the past two years. Far-right movements in Europe and in the US are not new, with the appeal of fascism now at its greatest extent since the years between the First and Second World Wars. Like it or not, the American Devolution, and that of the West, is already underway.
The treatment for any individual’s narcissistic personality disorder is one-on-one and group therapy, with the hope that empathy toward others can be learned. But if the US is geared toward narcissism as a society and the West with it, one cannot simply put an entire civilization on the couch for psychological treatment. For the US and the West, collective narcissism, systemic racism, and the violent, climate-changing world it has wrought might mean a steep decline of individualism as a worldview. But that could also fuel further collapse, as after centuries of individualism as a mantra, millions would likely rather die and take others with them before surrendering to a new world order of collectivism. Especially if it means others who aren’t white, male, or heteronormative become the leaders of a collective new world order.