The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism by Kristin Dombek

“As I gradually restore Words Like Silver to its archive of reviews written between 2011 and 2024, I'll aim to first and foremost make my reading history explorable by publishing the blurbs and short reflections as books cross my mind, with the goal of eventually transferring and fleshing out the original WLS content. For now, please enjoy this brief spotlight.”

2024 Update: It was interesting reading this review from June 2017. In recent years, I feel like a lot of online chatter relies on just calling everyone else narcissists. Sure, there's a collective swing towards a culture of individualism, but it's also an easy linguistic weapon to wield: just label everyone.

I'd be curious to know what I'd think upon rereading this essay nowadays, but it's clear in rereading my reflection that I found it to be pretty circular in its intrigue. Some good thoughts in there, but maybe not as hard-hitting as I hoped? I did recently read some of René Girard's work for the first time in fall 2024, so it's interesting to see his theories referenced in this as well years ago! Forever deepening my references.

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I’ve been reading a lot of big ideas lately. Especially in determining which majors I’ll go into next year, I’m curious about a lot of different areas: philosophy, religion, psychology, physics (although I’m terrible at math and therefore could never make it a career), art history, etc,. It’s a lovely yet cruel issue of being wholeheartedly interested in a lot of different areas and feeling the pressure of somehow whittling that down into something meaningful to study.

Especially as I approach the upcoming year, I’ve largely determined which areas I can presumably study effectively without burning out, versus which ones I’ll just have to cram into books, articles, and documentaries I consume on the side.

This summer, I’ve managed to find some excellent reads at well-curated independent bookstores. (Support your local indie, y’all.) Although I’ve stumbled upon good picks in Barnes & Nobles — and detest Amazon bookselling — I find that smaller places tend to give me a better sense about what will align with my personal taste.

They're among us, but they are not like us. They manipulate, lie, cheat, and steal. They are irresistibly charming and accomplished, appearing to live in a radiance beyond what we are capable of. But narcissists are empty.

No one knows exactly what everyone else is full of—some kind of a soul, or personhood—but whatever it is, experts agree that narcissists do not have it. So goes the popular understanding of narcissism, or NPD (narcissistic personality disorder). And it's more prevalent than ever, according to recent articles in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Time.

In bestsellers like The Narcissism Epidemic, Narcissists Exposed, and The Narcissist Next Door, pop psychologists have armed the normal with tools to identify and combat the vampiric influence of this rising population, while on websites like narcissismsurvivor.com, thousands of people congregate to swap horror stories about relationships with "narcs."

In The Selfishness of Others, the essayist Kristin Dombek provides a clear-sighted account of how a rare clinical diagnosis became a fluid cultural phenomenon, a repository for our deepest fears about love, friendship, and family. She cuts through hysteria in search of the razor-thin line between pathology and common selfishness, writing with robust skepticism toward the prophets of NPD and genuine empathy for those who see themselves as its victims. And finally, she shares her own story in a candid effort to find a path away from the cycle of fear and blame and toward a more forgiving and rewarding life.

First, I’ll start by analyzing the book itself. I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting from this tidy little novella (essay, technically.) In some ways, it was more academic than I’d originally assumed it would be; it’s stock-full of references, dates, and some jargon that went straight over my head.

It’s one of those books that, after finishing it, I’m not entirely sure whether or not I liked. That’s not to say it wasn’t valuable for me to read. It definitely was.

I love the feeling of looking up wherever I am — my bedroom, a couch, (in this book’s case) a crowded coffeeshop and suddenly feeling a surge of dizzying clarity. In this case, I looked at the people around me and wondered about our intersections. Not in the way On Love by Alain de Botton made me feel (like it’s all random and disjointed and somewhat made of luck that in no way diminishes its value) but in another way that questioned our own self-centeredness or lack thereof.

I’ll tackle some of those specific questions and realizations below, but The Selfishness of Others is a book that definitely provokes a reaction. So because I’m a person who just wants books that make me feel something or expand my mind, I enjoyed it as a whole.

In other ways, it’s shockingly personable and literary, especially towards the end. The author weaves in snippets of her personal reflections that sometimes wryly reflect her views on the subjects at hand. At times, this could get a little overt, but I still enjoyed them for the most part.

I only have two particular critiques:

• For one, parts of the essay felt sloppy. References felt rushed and overly esoteric. Because I’m not a psychology student at the moment, I wished she would have taken the time to slow down and refocus. It could have used some clarity.
• The literary ramblings were fun, but not entirely consistent. Some parts of the essay read like they’re taken from scholarship, while others are almost entirely personal. I do love books that are kind of mismatched, like The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but I wish that had felt more balanced.

Despite those problems, which were honestly pretty minimal, the book itself is an appealing thought wormhole of sorts. If that’s your kind of thing, I’d recommend. One of my favorite books, Franny and Zooey, covers similar questions.

Is any act of goodness or kindness truly selfless, if you get a rush of satisfaction upon its completion? Because of that impossibility, can earnest philanthropy actually exist? What’s the balance between self-knowledge and self-obsession? Without further ado, here are some lines and ideas that got to me, and what I took away from it all.

The Ideas/Lines

I’m going to divide these into questions and concepts I mulled over while reading, not the individual section headers.

Is narcissism a paradox that has no solution?

By obsessing over whether or not you are a narcissist, do you in fact become one? By diagnosing those around you with narcissism, does that mean you’re a narcissist because of false ideals of superiority and authority?It’s really easy to blame everyone else for everything by saying we live in a selfish culture. (That’s one of my pet peeves: “Social media is just because everyone’s obsessed with themselves. Everyone’s shallow.”)

But by preaching something like that – saying that everyone else “acts” a certain way – does that mean you see yourself as above the law, or being morally superior in any way? How is that not the same thing?

The Selfishness of Others first explores the claim and then rebukes it with an example from one of the narcissists detailed in an earlier chapter. She claims that all of this is because our generation cares more; they’re more concerned with people they’ve never met.

“ It’s easier to talk about the inappropriately grandiose dreams of the young – to go to college, to get promoted – as narcissistic than to talk about the various reasons why these average dreams will be thwarted.”

This section also talked about low-income groups, the American dream, and why “materialistic” culture is more likely due to the difficulty of economic prosperity in this day and age.

How do you construct your identity?

This book both illustrates extreme claims (like mass murderers) and smaller examples (like romantic partners who cheat.)

One of the lines I underlined – after a particularly in-depth case study – was that even in these examples, “the moment you begin to find that [the other person] lacks empathy – when you find him inhuman – is a moment when you can’t feel empathy, either.”

The Selfishness of Others also really helpfully describes the concept of “splitting,” a habit responsible for a lot of the terror we see in the modern world. The edge of the familiar, the bifurcation of the outside world into us vs. them. Fascinating.

“In an essay called “Empathy for the Devil,” philosopher Adam Morton claims that 'when we are struggling to understand the actions of someone who has done something wrong, it is seeing ourselves as humane…that most limits the accuracy of our empathy.'”

So the debate about whether or not true narcissism exists never fully reaches a conclusion. Instead, it offers both sides and leaves you to figure out the rest. As it states, “we are who we are in relation to others, to groups, to culture.”

I love this idea, particularly because a lot of the books like this I read are to foster more of a sense of identity. Who am I? How do I compare to others? How much of identity is something I can change?

What’s the ideal balance between self-sufficiency and dependency on others?

“In a 1979 critique of Freud’s ‘On Narcissism,” Girard suggests that what Freud diagnosed was not a kind of personality at all, not something people are or have, but the ordinary dynamic of all desire. We’re all performing self-sufficiency the best we can…such dependence on others is our fundamental, existential state.”

I try often to be independent, to love the feeling of being alone. I love to go to movies by myself; my default state to recharge is sitting by myself in a beautiful place, engrossed in whichever project I’ve deemed most worthy. But still, there’s a part of me that always longs to connect with others deeply and earnestly. So am I as self-sufficient as I like to believe?

She also brings this up in relation to others, in the sections “The Bad Boyfriend” and “The Artist.”

“Only one person can be the center of another person’s world at any given time, and ideally, this would always be you. This is where all the narcissistic romance websites invite you to be: in the center of the world, stuck in time, assessing the moral status of others, until love is gone.”

At this point in the essay, it feels like a circle with no solution.

So what can we do?

Towards the end of The Selfishness of Others, the essay explores the idea of mirror neurons, and empathetic accuracy. As it states, “the problem may be that people can be very good at assessing the mental states of others without being conscious of sharing those states.” Is awareness of sharing those mental states what motivates compassion? (According to a cognitive scientist at NYU cited in the book, yes.)

“ Just because we’re made of sharing doesn’t mean our understanding of others, often unconscious, leads us to care about them or treat them well.”

As Morton and Dombek both claim,

“The way protecting our image as a moral person can keep us from being exactly who we want to be – good at understanding the world and others, at preventing atrocities, at helping people to heal and change.”

In summary

This essay kind of drove me crazy, but in a good way. I went down this rabbit hole of taking narcissistic personality inventories and personality tests, trying to figure out whether my existential musings mean that I’m, in fact, a narcissist. How much of the world’s spin can you put on other people? How much do you assume for yourself?

I’m not sure what I think about all of this, but it’s valuable. If only for that checkbox, that step back, that evaluation of how I interact with others and what this all could mean in the end. I’m glad I read it, even though I disagreed with some narrative choices. And I did, truly, think it could be a lot clearer, even sorting through it in hindsight.