There are a couple of trendy terms which are knocking around these days and which nobody ever seems to question, namely self-esteem and empowerment.  These two concepts are met with almost universal approval, particularly among educators or New Age gurus.  If you want to help people become better, so their thinking goes, you've got to help them increase their regard for themselves, up to and including their capacity for (em)power.  That's all it takes, period.  Never mind old-fashioned, out-of-date stuff like character building, self-reliance, critical thinking, taking responsibility...  What matters for a successful life in our post-modern world is esteeming and empowering your very own little self.  In this our educational gurus are following in the footsteps of most current psychiatric thinking, which goes like this:  if you want to make a person better or healthier or more successful, what you've got to do is build that person's ego up.  And up and up and up it goes, until it rivals Pike's Peak in its gargantuan bulk.  It never seems to occur to these do-gooders than when a human being acquires an ego the size of a Rocky Mountain, you don't necessarily end up with a better person.  Empowerment corrupts.  Absolute empowerment corrupts absolutely.  If you do your tidy best to empower another human being, probably the only thing you will end up with is a true-blue, red-blooded, all-American narcissist.

Behavenet has a good definition of narcissistic personality disorder, symptoms of which include a need for admiration, a lack of empathy, a grandiose sense of self-importance, a sense of entitlement, and a belief that you are "special".  These kind of vainglorious self-important bozos are everywhere you look these days.  The American educational system churns them out by the millions.  They are the curse of our civilization.  I have long suspected that our wretched little planet must be the laughingstock of the entire universe, thanks to the innumerable narcissists who walk among us. 

It has been my experience that narcissists display all the tiresome behavior that you always find in hard-core addicts:  they are always absolutely obsessional (about themselves, of course), they need to surround themselves with enablers who constantly assure them that they are right and everyone else is wrong, and they thrive upon excuses excuses excuses.  Indeed, they are always fishing for someone in their vicinity to utter the magic absolution:  honey, it's not your fault.  Narcissists are addicts, and their substance is themselves.

I have long believed that no matter what kind of mess you get yourself into, you can always find a way to break free and make a fresh start.  Even some of the most hard-core addicts can find the strength to conquer their substance and find a new way of being.  But this never happens with narcissists.  Narcissism is the one addiction from which there is no escape.  Narcissists, after all, are functional human beings.  Frequently they are intelligent, literate, and perfect competent human beings.  Trying to convince a narcissist that there's something wrong with the way he thinks or behaves is one of the the ultimates in human futility.  Why should narcissists struggle against a problem which they don't believe actually exists?  Indeed, why should they listen to one of the non-special people of the world at all?  The only thing us slobs can do with these kind of people is avoid them (and also not vote for them).

Well, so what?  Is it that terrible being a narcissist?  Indeed it is, since narcissism does something more horrible than producing a narcotic dependence:  it renders all your talents, all your ideas, all your creative attempts forever mediocre.  If you want to be a successful artist, poet, novelist, spreadsheet designer, any kind of originator, you had better be on your guard about what kind of self-esteem/empowerment delusions you've got knocking around in your head.  The reality is that narcissism will always and forever engender nothing but creative mediocrity.

Screams of protests are now being loudly heard from all quarters of the self-esteem gurus.  What do I think I'm talking about?  How can you create a genuine or a powerful work of art unless you've got enough confidence to do so?  Unless you are in full command of your (em)powers?  How wrong can I get?

Well, bear with me for a moment.  One of the things I've learned from Tarot (and which I will explore more fully in Tarot Unbound) is that the key to a successful life, as well as the secret of happiness, does not come from building up but from letting go.  In other words, what matters most in our lives is not our self-satisfied sense of ourselves nor what we think we might be accomplishing in the world, but our ability to surrender--to a moment, to an experience, to another human being, to something outside of ourselves. The single most important card in the Tarot deck is that of the Hanged Man, the card of surrender.  This is the most enigmatic card in the deck, but if you learn its lessons you discover that you are well on your way to genuine spiritual wisdom.  Surrender is what matters in both successful living and successful creation--surrender, mind you, not empowerment.   You don't get what you want in life by clawing at something with your fingernails, nor by frantic attempts at control, whether or people, things, or ideas.  You get what you want only through release, surrender, acceptance, and returning again and again to the Dao.  Knowing how to let things go is the one crucial key to a happy life, not to mention successful creative ability.

This is one of the points which Mark Epstein makes in his book Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart (1999).  Epstein's book is an excellent analysis with what's so terribly wrong about current psychiatric practices.  They lead only to vanity and smugness, not to freshness, creativity, or freedom.  The only thing that most people ever seem to get from their shrinks is the kind of psychological or spiritual materialism which smothers their experience of the world, annihilates their spiritual insights, and destroys their ability to create.  You aren't going to create much of anything if you go through your life thinking you're the red hot center of the universe.

Only through surrender can we sense the inner reality of that which we encounter, and only when we can sense and convey the reality of something outside ourselves can we create something of value.  This is the key to successful artistic creation:  moving away from your strident little ego in the best Zen fashion in order to empathize or merge with something outside yourself.  Needless to say, this is something that your average narcissist will never manage.  They will forever go through life with a barrier between their fortress ego and the rest of the universe in all its splendor, between them and the unwashed masses souls they encounter, between them and the dirt glories of nature, between them and any feeling of derangement spiritual transcendence.

The way John Keats surrendered to the sound of a bird (Ode to a Nightingale) is a classic example of how surrender can lead to creative inspiration.  In this superb poem, one of the greatest ever written, Keats shows you step by step how to lose yourself in the experience of something outside of yourself.  This something was only the tweeting of some darn bird, of course, but Keats turned the experience into one of the most profound meditations on surrender ever written.  Keats was very much aware of the value, not of a strident, self-assured ego, but of the exact opposite.  In one of his most famous letters he makes a comment about how to achieve the kind of poetic power

... which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason...

So if you want any kind of artistic/literary success in your existence, you need to forget everything that makes you feel good about yourself.  What you need are uncertainties, mysteries and doubts in your life, not self-esteem, empowerment, conceit, or any kind of psychological materialism.

It also might do you some good to feel a little humility.  Consider the example of Marcel Proust, one of my literary idols.  I never got around to reading his masterpiece In Search of Lost Time until I was in my forties, which I now consider one of the biggest mistakes of my life since Proust's novel has probably had more impact upon me than anything else I've ever read (and if only I'd been smart enough to read him in my twenties!).  Proust opened my eyes to the mysteries of time and memory, the need for self-examination, the importance of the imagination, the necessity of aesthetic perception, the glories of nature, the intricacies of the human soul, and--most important--the spiritual vision in all great art.

And what kind of a man was Marcel Proust?  How did he see himself?  Here let me quote the supreme Proustian epiphany, that memorable moment when he got his whole being torn asunder by a cup of tea and a cookie:

No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?

The most interesting sentence in the above is "I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal."  This, apparently, was Proust's normal state of being prior to the above triple whammy.  Our Marcel had never been any kind of puffed up empowered ego--on the contrary, he had been going through the world feeling like a rotten shit until he experienced a miraculous transformative moment.  And when it happened, the moment didn't engorge his self-esteem, empower his vanity, or turn him into a Hollywood type.  It gave him a sense of a transcendent reality greater than his accidental mortal life, which was the insight he needed to create the greatest novel ever written.

Now imagine for a moment what would have happened had young Marcel fallen into the hands of a 21st century American educator, one of those earnest do-good types with a minor in psychology and a determination to reform the world one hapless kid at a time.  All of Marcel's feelings of mediocrity, of course, would have been kicked right out of him, as speedily as possible.  And with what careful patient care would our teacher would have cured his terrible self-esteem problem.  In no time at all young Marcel would have started to feel ... special.  Of course, that would have turned In Search of Lost Time into a slightly different kind of a book, something which most people wouldn't want to touch with a thousand foot pole, but who cares about that?  The only thing that would have mattered would be healing poor Marcel's little hurts and convincing him that he was nothing less than a golden treasure walking on earth.

There are perhaps some people who still disagree with all this.  Well, then take a look at the kind of fiction produced by a writer who never felt a moment of mediocrity in her life:  Susan Sontag.  Sontag is the kind of woman I ought to be able to admire:  a successful female intellectual, who was possessed of bohemian sensibilities and who made a widespread cultural impact.  She seemed to be about as intelligent as you can get, and most of her books were bestsellers.  So here's a woman to respect, right?

In a December 4, 2005 New York Times article entitled Illness as More than Metaphor, Sontag's son David Rieff describes his mother's losing battle with the cancer that had killed her.  The most interesting thing about the article is not Rieff's recital of his mother's struggles, but his description of the way Sontag reacted when she learned that her cancer had returned:  "This time, for the first time," she told her son, "I don't feel special."  Special?  She spent her life feeling special?  Rieff seems to be completely clueless about what a statement like this reveals about his mother.  He may as well have held up a sign saying MOM WAS A NARCISSIST.

But if you know anything about Sontag, you don't really need Rieff's statement to realize that the core reality of Susan Sontag was narcissism, and nothing else but.  Stories about her vanity, her conceit, and her arrogance are legion.  When she had to go out into the sticks to give a lecture, she simply shut herself off from anything that she might see or hear, up to and including the people she had to meet.  The only people who were real to her were the elites she associated with in New York or Paris, those special whiteys who actually weren't "the cancer of human history".  The other six billion souls on our planet simply didn't count.  Can you imagine Susan Sontag ever folding her hands, bowing her head, and saying namaste to another human being?

Well, of course not--Sontag never noticed anything outside of herself in her life, except maybe the sound of applause.  Not once did she ever experience the most intense sensation us mortals can know, that of transcendence, of vision, of universal interconnection.  Her vanity and her self-importance constantly served to flatten her creative ability as if it had been crushed under a two ton block of concrete.  There's not much of anything in Sontag's works except the kind of death-in-life which narcissism engenders.  In particular, her fiction is weak, colorless, and unoriginal.

I once found a used copy of Sontag's The Volcano Lover (1992) at a garage sale, which out of curiosity I purchased for twenty-five cents.  What did I think of it?  Well, during the course of my existence I have sat in classrooms, I have listened to Presbyterian sermons, I have attended strategic planning committee meetings, and I have watched the wallpaper dry.  In other words, I understand the meaning of the word boring.  But to say that The Volcano Lover is boring is inadequate.  This is a book which goes into some kind of galactic black hole of tedium where every dreary syllable clunks you in the head with stupefying dullness.  Sample paragraph:

They walked out into the searing heat, and at a food stall in the square she bought a packet of grimy sugar cakes, which Scarpia warned her against.  Oh, I have a very good digestion, the cavaliere's wife exclaimed.  Everything agrees with me.

Gee whiz, it must be real tough to be a New York intellectual big shot, since not only do you have to write mud like this, you've got to make all the other New York intellectual big shots read it--and like it, no matter what kind of sleeping pill agony it produces.

So if you're an aspiring artist--beware, beware!  The only way to create something of value is by going through life with an openness to experience, people, ideas, anything which exists outside of your own illusionary ego.  You also need to know how to release and surrender, not strut and fret your hour upon the stage.  Would-be novelists in particular should take note:  the man who felt mediocre, accidental and mortal wrote In Search of Lost Time.  The woman who felt special produced The Volcano Lover.