“Third-Eye Blind”: The Crisis of Inwardness
The narrow, hectoring, political self that greets us everywhere on the internet is defined by its sameness. Restoring the infinite dimension of the self, the part that relates to the eternal verities, is not likely going to come from technological developments.
Narcissus by Caravaggio, oil on canvas.
In diagnosing our contemporary malady (that affliction which plagues us at our very core) one answer comes up again and again; it is a wrong answer, almost the reverse of the truth, and therefore instructive. Consider, for instance, the perspective of Adam Curtis, director of thought-provoking documentaries like Hypernormalization and Can’t Get You Out of My Head. Curtis has frequently located our primary problem in our excessive inwardness. In his interpretation of history, the leftist impulse toward collective social change and mass movements has been replaced by an inward-looking narcissism. To illustrate this point, his documentaries juxtapose violent images from Syria and Afghanistan with footage of yoga classes, 1980s exercise videos, and dance Tik Toks.
From a right-leaning perspective, Silicon Valley billionaire investor Peter Thiel offers a similar assessment of the problem. In comments to the writer, Mary Harrington, he says, “We’ve had continued progress in the world of computers, bits, internet, mobile internet, but it’s a narrow zone of progress. And it’s been more interior, atomising and inward-focused.” In an interview, he notes further, “In the last 40 or 50 years, there’s been a shift from exteriority, which is doing things in the real world, to the interior world, which can be thought of as a shift from politics to entertainment. (Yoga, meditation, video games, etc.) […] we shouldn’t be in a yoga, meditative, and psychological retreat.” The time frame he gives for this shift, the last half-century or so, is the same given by Curtis.
Both thinkers are concerned with a slowing of progress: in Curtis’s case, social progress; in Thiel’s, technological progress. Given that the social and technological are inevitably intertwined, they are talking about the same thing, and both identify the same enemy: our “inward-focused” culture.
But is our culture really inward focused? The diagnosis seems off-base, or, at least, its vocabulary seems wrong. When a teenager gets addicted to making lip-syncing Tik Tok videos, is she suffering from a surfeit of “inwardness,” or is the problem perhaps something else? Is my own Twitter addiction a facet of my excessive inwardness? The criminal mastermind, the true spiritual and social culprit, remains afoot. We have got the wrong guy; the fingerprints do not match.
“Whereas the standard narcissist of today tries to project an image of a seamless whole, an ideologically consistent self, St. Paul looked within and noticed that his self was, in fact, contradictory.”
What Curtis and Thiel mean by inwardness is, effectively, its opposite. When people get involved in empty online rage—in attempts at cancellation, in the thousand petty quibbles that make up our world—they are not looking inside themselves. They are not contemplating their own souls or engaging in the Socratic imperative to “know thyself.” Rather, they’re looking outward: typically, into the glowing whirlpool of their phones, the world of simulation, which Thiel and Curtis correctly see as replacing the world of reality—the world of physical dynamism and true innovation. Consciousness is oriented outward. But it is oriented outward in a freakishly peculiar way.
Christopher Lasch was the ultimate diagnostician of this change in consciousness, and his growing popularity and frequent citation over the last decade (furthered by influential fans like the hosts of the podcast Red Scare) are not surprising. He saw we were engaged in narcissism rather than true inwardness or introspection. Whereas religious and philosophical traditions focused on the cultivation of the self, on its moral training, which involved introspection, our world focuses on the cultivation of “winning images.” The narcissist does not look inward but outward, just as the mythical Narcissus does.
Narcissus loves his reflection, but he does not show any real affection or care for his own soul. He does not even realize that he has one. He is completely immersed in the image: the outward projection. One hardly needs an illustration of how all social media literalizes this myth, with millions of people falling in love with their own reflections, their digital representations, daily and hourly. Thiel himself, in “The Straussian Moment,” made a potent observation: “The price of abandoning oneself to such an artificial representation is always too high, because the decisions that are avoided are always too important. By making people forget that they have souls, the Antichrist will succeed in swindling people out of them.”
The turn toward the mirror, the screen, is not an inward turn. Inwardness is, as Lasch observes, what the narcissist truly loses. To learn about real inwardness, we have to turn to wisdom literature.
It is often claimed that St. Paul discovered inwardness (at least, for the West) when he made the following observation: “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do […] For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.” Whereas the standard narcissist of today tries to project an image of a seamless whole, an ideologically consistent self, St. Paul looked within and noticed that his self was, in fact, contradictory. This sense of a tension within the self, of deceit, of forces pulling in different directions, is what true introspection can give you. Lacking such introspection, the narcissist wants you to buy into a glittering image without a crack or a flaw. His self-awareness is only superficial. Introspection would shatter the “winning image” and must be avoided at all costs.
To learn about real inwardness we turn to everything in our culture that has been ghettoized to the lonely spaces where wisdom still makes her home. We turn to the poets, to mystical literature like St. Teresa de Avila’s The Interior Castle, to the Upanishads and the Dhammapada, to philosophical texts like Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, and to relatively more recent sages like Kierkegaard and Emerson. Every great writer, thinker, and artist has an intensely cultivated inwardness. That is where the visions manifest.
Emerson said that his fundamental theme was “the infinitude of the private man.” Now, we are everywhere confronted by the finitude of the public man, which is specifically accentuated by technology. The narrow, hectoring, political self that greets us everywhere on the internet is defined by its sameness. Restoring the infinite dimension of the self, the part that relates to the eternal verities, is not likely going to come from technological developments. Rather, it will come from correctly corralling technology, putting it in a more humane place. This may bring Thiel and Elon Musk more of the benefits they are seeking from technology, since it will help produce technology that does something other than merely maintain the simulation.
Emerson said that his fundamental theme was “the infinitude of the private man.” Now, we are everywhere confronted by the finitude of the public man, which is specifically accentuated by technology.
If you want meaningful developments to continue in the external world, you first have to transform the way people are educated, nourishing consciousness with introspection and the books that further introspection. This is the thing that modern leftism has been struggling with all its might to suppress, reviling classical education and focusing on extremely recent, ideologically blinkered texts (White Fragility and so on). The insights of the ancients are the medicinal root, the real antidote to narcissism. Ironically, meditation and yoga, which are chucked into the New Age narcissist bin by Curtis and Thiel, are part of the Eastern wing of those ancient insights (when approached properly).
There is much to enjoy and learn from in Curtis’ documentaries, but they only show two alternatives: narcissism and involvement in a mass movement for social change. He plays these two forces off each other, showing the inevitable corruption of mass movements, with narcissism inevitably gaining the upper hand. But this is a limited frame, and it is limited because if Curtis were to suddenly endorse reading Aurelius or St. Augustine, he would lose the leftist part of his audience. It is too traditional a pill to swallow, but it’s the only one that fits the symptoms.
If we are going to get anywhere, socially or personally, we need to be memorizing sonnets. We need to be approaching literary classics the same way a devout Muslim approaches the Koran and the Hadiths or the way a devout Orthodox Jew approaches the Talmud and Torah. (Thomas Carlyle and Harold Bloom both thought Shakespeare could be our secular scripture, which is a reasonable suggestion.) You either gather around the hearth and make your family members read Hamlet aloud—and throw money at people who fulfill this noble goal—or you facilitate the universal collapse into narcissism. Be ye BBC documentarian or Silicon Valley Billionaire, the choice is yours.