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Back in the 1970s, historian Christopher Lasch famously coined the phrase "culture of narcissism," suggesting that contemporary American society suffered from a kind of collective personality disorder that was narcissistic in nature. When he offered specific examples to illustrate the personality traits which he considered pervasive, he used them to define broad social trends rather than to diagnose individual people, focusing more upon psychological dysfunction at the macro level.
I believe our own age suffers from a different personality disorder, one that has a few traits in common with NPD and also belongs to Cluster B (dramatic and erratic personality types). The grandiosity characteristic of NPD also appears in Borderline Personality Disorder, albeit in unstable and vacillating forms. Due to their self-absorption, people who suffer from both these disorders lack empathy for others and struggle to maintain lasting relationships. Both types are consumed by the need to build and support a sense of themselves as worthy.
Men and women who struggle with BPD also have a problem regulating their emotions. They have violent mood swings and rapidly shift between idealizing and despising the people in their lives. When triggered, they’re prone to outbursts of rage and vicious attacks on bystanders. They react impulsively without consideration of the consequences of their behavior or its effect on other people. They make use of friends and lovers to shore up a fragile sense of self, and when they feel let down or injured, they can easily turn on those others with vengeful malice.
These features describe much behavior across social media, our modern agora where people from every walk of life meet and interact without actually knowing each other. Anyone who writes today for a heavily trafficked website such as this one, who uses Facebook or Instagram to comment on culture and politics, or who opines on Twitter to the world at large risks exposure to enraged reactions, dehumanizing attacks that lack any sense of empathy or respect, and the unsettling experience of moving abruptly from pedestal to trash heap. When triggered, the audience who admired your last post or tweet may suddenly rip your guts out.
I’m hardly the first to note that righteous indignation, contempt, and above all unbridled rage dominate the Internet. Sometimes enraged public commentary has an apparently legitimate basis, though the intensity seems inappropriate. Sometimes the reaction seems tangential at best. And on other occasions, readers will take an author’s opinions quite personally for no obvious reason, as if they feel deeply insulted or wounded. Whenever they feel diminished in this way, out come the teeth and claws; the author finds herself eviscerated.
This type of response is so common that, like me, you might have come to the conclusion that a great many people out there are actually in search of something to get angry about, just waiting for a pretext to vent the rage they already carry within. Other therapists like me who have worked with people who suffer from BPD know what it’s like to sit across from a smoldering time bomb, a client parsing every word you speak for error, just waiting for you to make a “mistake” so they can explode. For this reason, I have dubbed ours the Borderline Culture. Millions of people cull through social media pronouncements in search of something that will justify a volcanic eruption of the rage already building inside them.
My own therapist referred to this as “rage looking for a reason.” I call it free-floating rage because it calls to mind the concept of free-floating anxiety. Early in the history of psychoanalysis, Freud described clients plagued by continual, vaguely defined feelings of anxiety that from time to time would attach to a specific idea or object, as if these men and women were in search of something to explain their pervasive dread. In a similar way, millions of people in Borderline Culture, pressured by the rage they carry, search for something to explain it, to make sense of their feelings, then to find relief by exploding in a relatively safe (i.e., anonymous) space.
Examples are so common that most readers will immediately understand what I mean. Widespread incivility and excesses of the call-out culture have led many observers to conclude that America has an anger problem. According to one study, nearly 1 in 10 Americans have both explosive anger issues and access to a gun, but many more of us have access to Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. If words could kill, social media would be littered with corpses. Due to encounters with unfiltered rage, most writers I know avoid reading the comments to their posts and articles. It’s just too painful to be assaulted, mocked, and belittled by strangers.
I’m not suggesting that all the people who react this way suffer from BPD, although some of them surely do. I’m addressing phenomena at the macro level, where public discourse within our culture powerfully displays traits and communication styles that denote a personality disorder. Like Lasch, I believe contemporary American culture embodies a pervasive psychological illness, with features displayed across the social landscape and political spectrum. Explosive rage and violent mood swings are the order of the day. Hateful comments are impulsively dashed off and published without any thought to their effect. Millions of contributors insist upon the superiority of their own views, building themselves up at the expense of the faceless people they despise. Empathy is of course in short supply.
Just as profound shame lies at the heart of BPD, I believe shame plays a large role in Borderline Culture. I speak of the widespread shame that comes from disconnection, feeling disempowered and unvalued by society-at-large. The shame of feeling left behind as wealth accumulates at the top. The shame of job loss, opioid addiction, and broken families. The shame of feeling scorned by people across the political divide. The subtle shame inspired by social media depictions of lives apparently happier, more socially active and more rewarding than our own. The shame of feeling “less than” and alone.
Human beings have an innate need to belong, encoded in our genes, and we feel shame whenever we find ourselves excluded or on the outside of a group that matters to us. Given the loneliness epidemic afflicting our country, where millions of people pass their lives in isolation, with few or no friendships of any depth, and no meaningful connection to other people, widespread and profound shame seems inevitable. Marginalized people everywhere struggle with low self-worth and chronic feelings of emptiness – exactly the way people who struggle with BPD feel at their core.
Rage and projection provide relief. As discussed in a prior post, righteous indignation often makes us feel better about ourselves. Anger supports a sense of superiority and facilitates the projection of unacknowledged shame into those inferior others. Contempt helps the process along and empathy disappears. In my consulting room, I’ve found myself attacked in the most vicious way by clients who struggled with Borderline Personality Disorder and it feels no different from many comments I receive whenever I write about sensitive issues. I’ve been treated with contempt, called names, and had my integrity questioned. In no uncertain terms, I’ve been told that I’m a bad person for holding the wrong opinions; the reader calling me out is, of course, enlightened and superior.
I claim no special victim status here and I’m not asking for sympathy. Such treatment is extremely common, the fate of anyone who does more than give a “thumbs up” to some anodyne post or submit adorable pet photos to Instagram. Hateful, indignant, and contemptuous exchanges are commonplace in the social media universe whenever someone voices an even mildly controversial opinion. Every day within Borderline Culture, free-floating rage finds ample reason to explain itself.
What’s the remedy? Thought leaders such as David Brooks recommend forging a stronger sense of community and personal engagement on the local level. My friend Marla Estes and her collaborator Rob Schlapfer build bridges across the political divide to diminish misunderstandings and cartoon-like depictions of the other, to bring diverse people together for the purpose of mutual understanding. And we’ve embarked on a national conversation about the isolation that comes from over-engagement with our smartphones and the unhappiness it engenders. All of these trends will help but will take many years to bring change.
As anyone who has worked with clients struggling with BPD will tell you, it’s a difficult, often intractable condition. Because the shame at their core feels quite literally unbearable, people with BPD revert again and again to the same impulsive escape maneuvers: exploding with rage, turning on friends and relationship partners, shattering the fabric of their lives in order to find temporary relief. Given the widespread loneliness and anomy of modern culture, is it any wonder that millions of people find Internet relief in just the way the same?
I believe that Borderline Culture will be with us for years to come.
