Incompetent Narcissists Think Highly of Selves

Today's teenagers and young adults are less competent but more confident than youth of previous generations. In a study published in the November issue of Psychological Science, San Diego State University's Jean Twenge and University of Georgia's W. Keith Campbell reveal the results of their analysis of over 30 years worth of data from the "Monitoring the Future" survey.

While today's teenagers seem to feel good about their futures, they actually do not report increased self-competence.

Slightly fewer recent students agree with "I feel I am a person of worth, on an equal plane with others," while more agree that "I do not have much to be proud of."

Twenge attributes this to the modern idea that self-liking does not necessarily relate to feelings of competence.

"Just as today's high school students are getting better grades for doing less work, students on average are more satisfied with themselves and expect better outcomes even though they don’t feel more competent," Twenge said. " American culture seems to be teaching young people to be overly confident." _SDSU

Decades of grade inflation, over-praising, and purposeful inflation of self-esteem at the expense of practical competence training have created entire generations of perpetually incompetent eternally adolescent man-children and woman-children--psychological neotenates.

A lot more dysfunction than just excessive praise for poor performance have been at work creating these "lost generations", of course. Absentee parents, government school indoctrination and purposeful dumbing down, treating of children as pampered pet poodles by large numbers of parents, segregation of children in age cohorts far away from real world responsibility or learning-exposure, absence of responsible male role models for large numbers of young men, etc. etc. Last but not least, is the lack of any meaningful rite of passage, or induction into a deep and meaningful cultural mythology, for modern generations. Nihilism may be the guiding light for most of the leftists who control the universities, media, and bureaucratic dead weight of the country, but nihilism is no way to run a sustainable culture for the long term.

It goes without saying that such confident and incompetent narcissists are a ready-made constituency for politicians such as narcissist-elect Barak Obama. Never having learned how to reason logically, and never having developed any sense of historical perspective for judging promises and claims, these lost child-adults can be easily swayed by popular media, peer pressure, and perceived authority figures such as pundits, professional journalists, and professors.

Once the human foundations of a democratic society degrade to this point, there is no assurance that it will ever find its way back to a point where most voters were self-made individuals with hard-won educations and livelihoods. Once the incompetent narcissists predominate and learn habits of dependency on government for every need, the way back is almost hopeless. Europe is learning this hard lesson at the same time it is being overrun by uneducated, untrainable third worlders from muslim areas of the world.

If Obama's government goes the way of Europe--dominated by labour unions and government linked special interests--it becomes less unthinkable to consider an actual breakup of the United States in the foreseeable future. If such a thing were to happen, it might be accompanied by a realignment of particular states with Mexico and others with Canada.

Unlikely? Yes. But never before has a country descended into an Idiocracy with such rapidity as the US is currently doing. It may take some time to learn how far Obama plans to take his revolution.