On Leading the Cheers for No.1

By Frank Trippett

The first right on earth is the right of the ego.

-- Ayn Rand

With her usual authoritarian sweep, Author Ayn Rand strikes a basic blow for her consistent dogma of individualism. Though she is more a cult figure than a popular philosopher, her words mirror an attitude that is becoming more and more common in the U.S., particularly among public figures. Indeed, an increasing number of Americans seem to have concluded that the right to ego implies the duty to exercise it publicly. The result is something of a rout for the time-honored American taboo against tooting one's own horn. Today it is commonplace for Americans to come right out and admit just how wonderful they really are.

Listen to the new surge of self-applause. Television's Howard Cosell ranks himself as a sports commentator: "I really believe I'm the best. My relationship with the men who play the games -- all games -- is probably unparalleled in this country." Private Citizen Joan Kennedy assesses herself for a Ladies' Home Journal interviewer: "I have talent. I know I'm smart. I got straight A's in graduate school. I've still got my looks. I know I've got all these terrific things going for me. I mean, my God, you are talking to, I think, one of the most fascinating women in this country." Sugar Babies Star Mickey Rooney makes clear he knows all there is to know about the atrics: "I'm 58 years in the theater. No body gives me instructions."

Baseball Player Reggie Jackson speaks of his importance to his sport: "I am the straw that stirs the drink. It all comes back to me." Chrysler Chief Lee lacocca recalls what happened to him while he was rising in the busi ness world: "I got pretty damn good." Chicago Realty Mogut Evangeline Gouletas awards herself an ovation on the eve of marrying Governor Hugh Carey of New York: "In Chicago, they love me. In Chicago, I am already First Lady." Novelist Gore Vidal confides why the New York Times published a favorable review of his new book Creation: "They're desperate for me to write for them."

Bleats of unchecked egoism are now so commonplace that self-glorification may be well on the way to becoming standard American style. Yet such an epidemic of flagrant braggadocio would have scandalized the country not long ago. Most Americans have always felt, as many still feel, dutybound to sniff at the ostentatious chest thumper and look down on all public boasting. Brazen self-admiration has never been considered criminal, nor necessarily degenerate, but it has always been judged tacky -- poor form, at best. Good form has always required reticence about one's virtues. To think well of oneself was one thing, but, under the traditional rules, it was quite an other to give voice to one's privately cultivated selfesteem. In deed, even if somebody else called attention to one's admirable points, one was supposed to disclaim the praise.

The braggart, of course, has always been present on the American scene, and boasting has been tolerated when it hap pened to come from certain types -- poets, entertainers, politicians -- who were considered beyond the pale anyhow. It was all right for Walt Whitman to indulge his flagrant self-celebration ("I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious") because, as a poet, he was lost to gentility anyway.

The public similarly has always recognized that in a democracy, where candidates for elective office have to sell themselves like consumer goods, politicians have little practical choice but to depict themselves as heaven's gift to the voter. Still, for most people, self-containment has long been thought a virtue.

The old ideal probably had begun to fade when Norman Mailer published a hodgepodge of fiction and autobiography under the title Advertisements for Myself. In any case, windy self-advertisement became more and more popular in the years that followed. Said John Lennon at the peak of the Beatles' popularity: "We're more popular than Jesus Christ now." Said Heavyweight Boxer Muhammad Ali, in a typical flight: "It ain't no accident that I'm the greatest man in the world at this time in history." The same period at last produced an intellectual model for publicly saluting the self: Commentary Editor Norman Podhoretz's autobiographical book Making It. Wrote Podhoretz: "I looked upon those who possessed ... fame, and I liked what I saw; I measured myself against them, and I did not fall short."

The ideal of modesty, though hardly dead, has begun to seem almost quaint. In an age when some observers think the U.S. has entered the "culture of narcissism," in the words of Christopher Lasch's study, many people think that self-effacement is tainted with hypocrisy. Says Economist John Kenneth Galbraith in his new memoir A Life in Our Times: "Truth is not always coordinate with modesty." Perhaps, but then, truth is never coordinate with vanity. Self-praise is inescapably distorted and corrupted at its source, and this--not some arbitrary convention of etiquette--makes the self-praiser always seem at least ridiculous or fraudulent, and often worse. One must return to Reinhold Neibuhr for the key: "Since the self judges itself by its own standards, it finds itself good."

The standard of modesty evolved out of concerns deeper than ephemeral questions of style and etiquette. The discipline of reining in one's tendency to boast is, after all, merely part of the larger discipline of keeping the ego in check. And why should anyone wish to do that? Simply because the main thing that traps people into spiritual emptiness is some sort of berserk ego. Says Psychologist Shirley Sugerman in Sin and Madness: Studies in Narcissism: "The ancient wisdom of both East and West [tells] repeatedly of man's tendency to self-idolatry, self-encapsulation, and its result: self-destruction."

Nobody need suppose that a bit of windy conceit is going to add up to self-destruction. Still, everybody knows at heart that boasting usually signals some pathetic private weaknesses. Psychology has never been mystified by braggadocio. Says Associate Director John Schimel of the William A. White Institute of Psychiatry: "It is a way of denying some form of insecurity." The rule is simple: the louder and more prolonged the bragging, the more profound and painful the secret doubts and distances that are being masked. Given this pattern, the self-glorifier deserves less than applause and more than mockery. Pity is perhaps the appropriate response.

--By Frank Trippett

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