How Science Breeds Narcissists & Zombies

by Asa Boxer

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From George A. Romero’s famous Night of the Living Dead (1968).

It recently occurred to me that what I’ve been referring to as leftbrainitis has a distinctly narcissistic flavour. I mean this in the clinical sense. The critiques I’ve levelled at the popular new atheists like Sam Harris, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Michael Shermer, and even the lay leadership of the new atheist movement point to delusions of grandeur, belief in one’s own omniscience, accompanied by outbursts of verbal abuse, campaigns to censor and silence critics, and even to punish anyone holding different views: omniscience and omnipotence. Anthony Fauci’s statements equating himself with TheScience™ are a case in point. “I represent science” and “I say people who then criticize me about that are actually criticizing science” are clear indicators of phantasies of omniscience and what clinicians call a “false self.” Most importantly, narcissism in the clinical sense also entails a lack of empathy. Certainly Fauci, Harris, and deGrasse Tyson have displayed this inability to consider how their words and actions might affect others.

Religious institutions too can nurture narcissism, though the spiritual teachings do not provide a rationale for it. In fact, the spiritual doctrines of religion invariably caution against self-important and self-centred behaviour and instead recommend humility.

There is however a community dynamic that corrupts the foundational doctrines and ethics of religion. I’m thinking of the ubiquitous belief that our god is greater than your god. This kind of thinking directly undermines the exhortation of humility. Couple that with the saviour complex that marks proselytisers, and you have a recipe for promoting and advancing the narcissists of the group. “Only through my god can you be saved” comes hand in hand with “To reject my god and my way leads to hell and eternal damnation.” The more pious one is, the more likely one believes oneself to occupy a special place in the heart of the Lord. In such circumstances, humility becomes the pose and clothing of an inwardly self-righteous and punishing individual who believes he is the perfect vehicle for expressing the divine will. To put it in the Jungian idiom, he usurps the God image. (To put it in the Faucist idiom, he represents the science.)

It may be argued that science too provides an ethic of humility. In its uncorrupted state, science promises objectivity in the face of evidence. If the data prove a scientist wrong, he is bound to acknowledge error and accept the facts. Trouble is, unlike a spiritual teaching, the science ethic has nothing to do with character development and one’s responsibilities towards others. The call for scientific objectivity is focused specifically on right and wrong in the business of science. As I pointed out in a previous article, objectivity in the self-developmental sense refers to an open mindedness that arises from our being of two minds, suspended between what neuroimaging scientist Iain McGilchrist refers to as our left and right brains—the analytical and the analogical. This is the psychological condition necessary to good science, but it is nowhere acknowledged or codified as a part of science pedagogy. . . which I have previously discussed as distorted textbook pedagogy.

So if we’re comparing science and religion in this regard, it must be acknowledged that despite the corruptibility of religion, it does at least provide the groundwork and guidance necessary to healthy character development whereas science provides no such guidance.

In fact, science provides a host of conditions and rationalisations that encourage and support the development of narcissistic character traits. The most obvious today is the selfism promoted by Dawkins, the idea that we are all essentially selfish robots because directed and driven by a selfish imperative inherent to the genetic software to self-replicate and reproduce. The machine metaphor is central to the scientific paradigm because all things must be understood as mechanism for science to analyse how it works. In the process, however, it loses sight of interiority—what poet Ted Hughes (1930-1998) called “the inner world.” In fact, science goes further and denies the reality of the inner world and even of consciousness, claiming that consciousness and the heart life are dubious epiphenomena of brain mechanisms that arose accidentally. Your inner life, the science tells us, is a messy accident we’d be better off excising. Indeed, without an emotional life, we’d be perfect and superior beings like Commander Spock and Hal 9000.

If clinical narcissism emerges from the lack of a coherent self, often described as a sense of complete inner emptiness, then science itself provides a paradigm and rationale that supports and even extols the emotional illness. No worries, the pharmaceutical arm of science has pills to obviate all that emotional discomfort that comes of denigrating and ignoring the inner life so you don’t have to ever deal with it and pursue the avenues that might help you grow. Science exhorts us to reject all those lies: the stories and myths and spiritual disciplines that help us build individuality and develop a soul. Science would have us all transformed into empty machines: rational, logical, cold and calculating, devoid of empathy and fellow feeling.

I came across this article on antidepressants a couple of weeks back. Although referred to as a “rare” side effect, the true rate of harm is unknown—especially since pharma has a long track record of burying evidence. Meanwhile, post-SSRI sexual dysfunction (PSSD), among the worst side-effects, is not merely the failure of sexual mechanism:

“It’s not just the sexual dysfunction that persists for years after stopping the drug, they also feel totally dissociated from life, almost as if they’re watching their life play out on a screen. They can’t feel anything,” explained Witt-Doerring.

In other words, the drug potentially empties out one’s heart life, one’s vitality. The zombie metaphor comes to mind. So does the condition of the narcissist and the ideal state that science culture celebrates. No doubt SSRIs have helped some people without destroying their ability to love. What’s of interest in the present context, however, is that science itself is causing the condition of inner emptiness. It is significant too that our zombie stories usually entail a scientific cause, a lab leak.

By and large we still recognise the erasure of the inner life as undesirable. But considering the values of science culture, we should not allow ourselves to feel secure in the understanding that this perception will persist. Keep in mind that although we all recognise that selfishness is bad, science has convinced us that we are nonetheless ineluctably selfish, and this has led to a culture marked by selfish behaviour. The way things are going, we may easily find ourselves living selfish, empty lives simply because TheScience™ supports it. Oh. Wait! . . . That’s already happening. The zombie hordes are already shuffling about, taking endless selfies.

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Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018) and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also the founder and editor of analogy magazine.