Understanding The New Narcissism by Understanding Kitchen Nightmares

"He will live a long life, as long as he never knows himself" "Don't blow smoke up my arse, Tiresias, he's fucking ROTTEN!"

I

Something about the cancel culture debate/debacle rubs me the wrong way. I'm not nearly as passionate about this as certain other members of the blogosphere, but it seems emphatically wrong.

How do you square being a huge fan of cancel culture with acknowledging the psychological trauma it causes? It must be a really effective tactic if you're willing to risk breaking people's brains, right?

...oh. So not only is this shit horrible, it doesn't work? In the words of a very unwise man, "What the fuck are we doing here?"

I think I know what the gotcha is SUPPOSED to be here. Maza has, purposefully or not, laid out the compassionate classical-liberal-type argument against cancel culture - it ruins people's lives. Lubchansky is saying "no, it doesn't ruin people's lives, because they get money and press!" I have to say, as someone with a passing knowledge of existence, money and press attention are not necessarily antithetical to ruined lives and poor mental health. My source is every celebrity apart from maybe Dave Grohl, and even he was hospitalised for addiction. If I were even more bold I'd go so far as to suggest that cancel culture makes you go a bit mental, and there is a sort of cottage industry devoted to using your mental-ness to make a quick buck through the culture war, and as such, you should DEFINITELY stop cancelling people simply because it's exactly what these parasitic outlets want, what they thrive on. This all seems so obvious to me that I'm struggling to put it into words - how do I explain that "people don't like it when you hate them, and therefore gravitate to the people that do like them, even if they're exploitative/have political views that you, the people that hate them, abhor" to the type of person that doesn't already understand that? "I know they won't like me, but I'm right and they're wrong, and I'm tired of censoring myself for white people's/men's/cis people's bullshit!" Absolutely understandable, bigots are exhausting, but quick question: WHY ARE YOU THE ONE IN CHARGE OF ARGUING? You know you don't have to do this, right? I've been entertaining myself playing this game called New Star Cricket recently, very therapeutic. I play guitar until it hurts to type. I don't force myself to interact with people I hate. Even this article is just written for like five of my mates (safe, lads and ladettes) and is not meant to change the world. Please for the love of all that is holy, for your own sake, and the sake of your causes, log. the. fuck. off.
 
Sprezzaturites already know why we cancel, anyway. People like Dave Chappelle aren't just bad, they're guilty of (social) tax evasion. There's a reason Shane Gillis was fine until he got on SNL - his milieu is other retards that think "me rikey fried rice!"-tier banter is the height of comedy, but SNL's target demographic is the type of liberal that unironically felt distraught when Kate-McKinnon-as-Hillary played Hallelujah after the election. Not only are they never gonna (admit to) find(ing) racism funny, your apology, or lack thereof, is proof that you belong, or don't belong, on their side of the aisle. Chappelle and co. cannot be allowed to profit off of their un-wokeness because if you and yours are no longer the arbiters of taste, then what the FUCK was the point of going to Dartmouth for media studies? It's not like there's anything else to do in New Hampshire but scold. And yes, taste in comedy means what is good and moral rather than what's funny, c.f. Gadsby, we got rid of all values except politics YEARS ago dahling, it's ever so chic.

This is most clear in Osita Nwanevu's piece in the New Republic, 'The "Cancel Culture" Con.' I don't want to go on about how the entire journalist class is garbage, even though it totally is; I want to take a more sympathetic view. This piece is one of the most incredibly sad things I've read in a while. Nwanevu essentially details situation after situation in which he and his cohort were powerless to stop terrible things from happening. Chappelle and Gillis making rude jokes, yeah, but also #MeToo and the murder of Muhlaysia Booker for being trans. "...anti-vaxxers, Flat Earthers, and keyboard Klansmen..." Jesse Singal, referenced in the post, thought that the part about Booker was needlessly interjected for effect, but that's the key. This piece is the anguished cry of a generation that has no idea how to do anything, how to save people from being murdered, raped, and so forth, except for cancel. Maza, Lubchansky, and Nwanevu are all unconsciously BEGGING for something to do that isn't a 'calling out,' but when all you have is a 'yikes,' everything looks like a cringepost. Boys (and girls) are dying on these streets, and we have no clue what to do.

But how did we get to the point that a generation has no idea how to produce any kind of lasting change on any front? Makes you think.

II

Conservatives have been chimping out about Greta Thunberg for a while now, because if there is one thing they love conserving it is wealth, and if there is one thing they do not care about conserving at all it is oxygen, but I want to focus on the bipartisan response to Greta, i.e. fuck all. Our girl has Aspergers, which, as she has said, functions as a superpower. It allows her to be way blunter than anyone concerned with offence might be. And my God she has not held back. She has produced jeremiad after jeremiad, directed at the most powerful people in the world, but nothing has happened. Do you know what people have been saying? "Give her the Nobel Peace Prize!" Why? For being angry? "For speaking truth to power!" Power doesn't CARE, otherwise power would've already done something about renewable power. It takes a remarkable kind of fuckwit to say "actually i'm going extra holidays and making sure the plane guzzles loads of gas, haha, take that u ugly freak," but it takes an even more confusing fuckwit to say "Hey, give her the Nobel Peace Prize!" instead of "Hey, maybe we should elect environmentally-conscious politicians like Corbyn and Sanders!"

Prizes are cosmetic - they're about image. They're about being acknowledged by some kind of judge that you did A Good. What prizes are not is concrete change with regard to environmental conduct. This same impulse, one of not changing, of being SEEN to be doing something important ("Look, we listened to the little sperg, isn't that enough?") rather than doing something important, is what allows these world leaders to hear the venom that she spits at them and clap afterwards, like some solemn equivalent of Homer going "IT'S TRUE, we're so lame!" My only hope on this front is that Greta is so steadfast, so autistic, in her desire for change that she will not be placated until something is actually done. Unfortunately for her, I feel like the system is set up in such a way that there is no escape for her. She could stand on stage at the Nobels and say "I don't want this, I want you lot to start giving a fuck," and everyone would just clap and talk about how stunning and brave she was, and then not change. She'd be forced into a Black Mirror-esque existence, where once-passionate unbridled rage curdles into a routine, unimportant expression, 'come see Greta admonish us every Tuesday at 8/9c!'

But how did we get to a point where our political class is so reluctant to change? Why do they take joy in being reminded that they suck? Why is everyone so much more concerned with how things look than how they are? What could they possibly mean by this? I, for one, am stumped. Let's watch some trash TV instead.

III

"the difference between the uk version of this show and the fox version is startling in the uk version we kind of look into why restaurants have trouble in the us version we are watching intervention except near a kitchen" - kris straub, chainsawsuit

Kitchen Nightmares is a program where famous chef Gordon Ramsay tries to save a failing restaurant. It started out in England, and the English series are notably more freeform than their later American counterparts. The lazy person in me wants to put that down to "haha septics cannot into programming that isn't disgustingly formulaic," but I'm the one that's seen basically every episode of both versions, so I'll keep quiet. The formula is as follows:

• Gordon visits the restaurant for lunch. Lunch is bad.
• Note: I'm not sure there's ever been an episode of the American show where Gordon has liked the food. This is in contrast to the English version, where on occasion the food has been good. Mama Cherri's Soul Food Shack springs to mind, as does a restaurant in Scotland where the food wasn't poor quality, but too haute cuisine to attract customers. The formula cannot be tampered with Stateside, though. Change is bad.
• Gordon will sometimes like a particular dish, most often a dessert, which always just happens to be made by someone who disagrees with the chef's methods. It's really a crazy coincidence.
• Gordon confronts the owners/cooks about the absolute state of lunch, big disagreements ensue. People may cry, they may scream, Gordon will almost certainly tell someone they're in denial.
• Gordon returns for dinner service, in a chef's jacket for some reason, and it turns out that the kitchen is incredibly disorganised. Numerous dishes will be sent back for being over/undercooked/the wrong thing/just really bad. Gordon will take some time to investigate the fridge/freezer and realise that everything in stock is either rotten, or frozen, or rotten AND frozen. He asks to grab the owner(s) for 'two seconds' to show them how abysmal their inventory is. Once service is over, he gathers the entire staff and tells them big changes will be due in the morning.
• In the morning, Gordon will institute one big change. If the food is the problem, he'll introduce a special. If it's a staff member, he'll suggest they change role and do something else, or get rid of them entirely.
• Dinner service this day will go almost as badly as yesterday, but the special will be very popular, any new employees will excel, and anyone moved position by Gordon will have found their true calling within the restaurant business.
• Overnight, Gordon's design team will refurbish the entire restaurant so it looks 'fresh', 'modern' and 'vibrant' (unless it's beautiful already, which is rare but can happen), and Gordon devises a new menu that updates things to become, yes, 'fresh', 'modern', and 'vibrant'.
• The final day's dinner service goes essentially perfectly. There is normally one final problem the restaurant needs to overcome, and this is normally done by simply firing someone, moving someone around again, or something else that fits in the three remaining minutes available to the program.
• Gordon then walks out of the restaurant, giving a quick summary of what's gone on.

When you have watched way too many episodes of this program, certain things will begin to stick out to you. The way that if Gordon likes the food it was never made by the head chef is one. The way Gordon eats is another. He will, for example, eat a pizza by taking a slice, scraping off all the toppings with a knife and fork, and then prodding it and saying it looks doughy. Of course it does, honey, dough is all that's left now. In order to make things seem more disgusting than they actually are, all sorts of tricks like this are pulled (another classic is the sound crew adding gross slime noises whenever Gordon plays with a plate of food). If Gordon ever asks for one of everything on the menu you can be sure that the restaurant has a menu that is way too large. He will never do this anywhere with a reasonably-sized menu. And so on, and so on *sniff*.

This simple formula provides the framework around which every episode is structured. However, the best episodes of Kitchen Nightmares are the ones that tear at that framework until it's unrecognisable, the episodes where the owners cross the line from standoffish to incomprehensible, the episodes where Ramsay really seems to be at his breaking point. I was originally fascinated by these episodes because I did not understand what was going on in any of these owners' heads, but I now realise that for quite a few of them, their behaviour is best explained using Lasch's, as well as TLP's, concept of narcissism. I'm going to try and explain that concept with regard to the show, and nothing else. Nothing else.

IV

It would be irresponsible of me to play armchair psychologist and suggest that most people that go on Kitchen Nightmares have some form of mental health problem. And yet.

Depression appears surprisingly regularly, mostly in the form of middle aged men that have checked out of their businesses for one tragic reason or another and spend their days alternately drinking or sulking themselves into a stupor. Amy's Baking Company is an infamous episode because of how crazy the two proprietors are as well, but in that case I don't see mental illness so much as I see a couple that have folded themselves into an almost cute folie à deux, where it's them against the world of haters, trolls, and people with tastebuds. But the most obvious issue that recurs time and time again is narcissistic personality disorder.

Narcissism is one of them ones where it seems simple but is really not. "It's when you love yourself too much, right?" No, and the fact that it's defined as that in popular culture is actually a big problem. Here, read the story of Narcissus over at the Last Psychiatrist blog. The first thing you should notice is that's not the story of Narcissus, it's rhetoric, a 'fake', and that bothers you. We'll come back to that. Narcissism is the horrible inversion of sprezzatura; instead of seeming untalented while acting competently, your efforts are expended on seeming talented while actually doing nothing of use.

Narcissism is the maintenance of appearance, imagined or not, at the expense of everything else. So, yes, people that go to great lengths to look pretty are narcissists. Not because they are in love with themselves, though, the point is that they desperately need *other people* to think they're pretty. As I alluded to, it's not just a case of positive feeling toward oneself either; someone that has identified with the fact that they're a loser will, subconsciously or not, make sure that they remain a loser, because at least that's a defined existence. If they change, if they start bulking, say hi to that one girl, you don't know her, she goes to a different version of you that's cool school, then what are you??? Not a loser anymore, and that's the exact problem.

Most pertinently for our task of looking at Kitchen Nightmares and only Kitchen Nightmares, once you have decided you are A Good Chef, there is very little that will change your mind, because if you stop being A Good Chef, you stop being what you have decided is you, and then you have to ¿¿¿¿¿¿, and we all know no one wants that. The "Sebastian's" episode of Kitchen Nightmares USA is such a perfect insight into the narcissistic personality that I honestly wouldn't be suprised if Christopher Lasch executive produced it in conjunction with the Last Psychiatrist. It showcases the kind of madness that normally seems completely inexplicable, but since we know the format of the show, and the format of our collective psyche, we can see the resolution coming a mile off.

One of the key things that results from a person enveloped in narcissism is the concept of a narcissistic injury. A narcissistic injury is what happens when someone points out the incongruence between your 'appearance' and your actuality. For example, if you tell everyone you're a writer, and then someone asks to see your work, and then you explain, no, actually, I just hang out at Starcucks a lot and scoff every time someone mentions Joyce, and then your interlocutor says "You're not a writer, then, are you?" and you laugh politely as you imagine ripping their aorta straight out of their sternum and feeding it to the person they love the most, or at least exposing THEM as a fraud, the way they've exposed you, yeah, then they'll be sorry, you have suffered a narcissistic injury. Or, if you think you're a good chef and then an angry person from Glasgow-via-Warwickshire tells you you're shit, and everyone agrees with them, and you do the whole aorta thing again, you have suffered a narcissistic injury. Sebastian's constant outbursts are a result of this; everytime someone, whether it's Gordon, his sous chef Bertha-Lou, or even his wife, dares to question his persona, of Big L.A. Chef, he flies off the handle. "This pizza sucks!" "Our kids are starving, fix the fucking restaurant!" I don't think you lot understand???? I'm SEBASTIAN, THE GOOD CHEF!!!!! All narcissistic injury leads to reflexive rage, and that's why Bertha-Lou is so used to his shit. It's just what narcissists do.

Another important thing about Kitchen Nightmares is its format may as well have been specifically designed to injure narcissists. You remember the section where Gordon changes things and then things, give or take one or two hiccups, go smoothly? A proper narcissist cannot hack that. It is fundamental that you remain the main character, and so what we see time and time again is people reverting to their old menus, no matter how good a response Gordon's menu gets, because the goal is not to be good, but to be them. Sebastian looks at Gordon's menu and says "I don't see any uniqueness" like a seven-year-old disappointed that his parents refuse to add his crayon sandwich to the dinner party menu. His menu makes absolutely no sense, is impossible for the servers to explain, and is wildly unpopular, but it's his, and so he must defend it to the death, and revert to it halfway through service. "Can you taste the thumbtacks?" Except in this case the thumbtacks are debt collectors with weapons and Chief Wiggum's mouth is Sebastian's children, may God have mercy on their souls.


The Mill Street Bistro is another fantastic episode for watching narcissistic personality disorder play out in real time. Our owner, Joe Nagy, is constantly lying, but either he doesn't realise, or doesn't care, because it's all congruent to the kind of person he likes to think he is. "I was self-taught, by old European masterchefs!" Of course you were, honey, now take your dementia meds, your grandchildren are coming and you need to be cognisant enough to work out which one you want to bequeath your pitiful inheritance to. Watch what happens when Gordon lets the staff confront him while he's out of the room (10mins into the second ep). The slide from "I'm sorry" to "we all need to do better" is textbook narcissistic inability to feel guilt. That inability to feel guilt is important, by the way. Assuming you were raised with a sense of right and wrong more comprehensive than "whatever I, your parent does, is good," hopefully when you hurt someone's feelings you think "Gosh, maybe I went too far, I should apologise." A narcissist does not have this thought. Their brain will rationalise bad behaviour any way they can. This is where the Narcissist's Prayer, an r/raisedbynarcissists special, comes from:

That didn't happen.

And if it did, it wasn't that bad.

And if it was, that's not a big deal.

And if it is, that's not my fault.

And if it was, I didn't mean it.

And if I did...

You deserved it.

 

So Joe truly thinks he has nothing to do with the failure of his restaurant, and that's why his brain can so easily flit from repenting to belittling his staff. Watch also how his tone shifts when he realises there are customers waiting for him, i.e. outside influences that might judge him harshly. Joe feels ashamed and immediately pivots from scathing critique to meaningless platitudes. Narcissists do not feel guilt (internal), only shame (external). It's what happens when you have no internal moral compass and thus must derive your concept of what is good from outside.

Second half of the episode, 27 minutes in - you know it's bad when they need a two-parter - Joe and Gordon have their biggest face-off, and Joe produces his most blatant lie. "We were face to face, and I said 'you're nothing but a narcissistic *BLEEP*', I said... I said 'you have seven hundred fifty chefs to think for you?' I said 'You need 'em!' Chef Ramsay doesn't have the balls to kick me out of my kitchen." And god bless the editors, they show Gordon doing just that. Firstly, do you see how in his fantasy land, he is exposing Gordon for being a fraud? Next to snapping Gordon's spinal cord in half, this is the most cathartic thing a narcissist can do. You project your own fraudulence onto others so you don't, and say it with me now, have! to! change! It's also very important that Joe is talking to customers outside when he says this nonsense, because that's all part of the delusion. Pathological lying is an extreme symptom of narcissism. The quick rundown, if you can't be arsed to click on the link (in which case I would ask how you've made it this far?), is that the lie comes because it fits with your idea of yourself. '[the liar] acknowledges that the "facts" are lies, but not the essence, the spirit.' says TLP. "I'm strong, I'd never let Ramsay kick me out of my kitchen [that he just kicked me out of]!" says Joe, who REALLY wants that strong part to be true and works from there. To which I say, that's amazing, my love, but you really need to take your medication, there's someone on the phone who wants "power of attorney," saying something about "not letting that bastard spunk any more of my inheritance on a fucking elk farm, are you dumb?" and it sounds urgent.

Again, once service starts running smoothly without Joe - indeed, when he is literally the only problem with service - he beings to break. And then we see that "inverted", down-on-oneself, narcissism.
Gordon: you were fucking hard work, you know that? you made this all as difficult as you could
Joe: yeah, but we're talking about me, Joe Nagy! It's never easy with me
Even an objectively terrible personality trait, your stubbornness, is reframed as an integral part of your being, just what makes you you, "teehee what am I like", because the alternative is growing as a person, and heaven forbid that.

aw man might have to grow and improve as a person this next year STILL

— sidley park fan account but scary (@volvicstorm98) August 29, 2019

I could go on and on, but I feel like you guys probably get the picture. Like I said, the show's methods of change are not conducive to long-term narcissistic change, partly because I have established it is very difficult to get a narcissist to change, and partly because they don't give a shit beacuse it's just TV. Discovering Bertha can really cook is just about the worst thing you could do if you wanted Sebastian's to succeed, because then the film becomes about her ascent from line cook to high quality chef, and not about Sebastian's amazing menu idea. Bringing in an outside chef from a big city to the Mill Street Bistro is just about the worst thing you could do if you wanted it to succeed, because Nagy has positioned himself as the head chef, a maverick doing things in direct opposition to the coastal orthodoxy, not just some guy who owns a restaurant where there's a talented chef. His role in the film becomes "older mentor with money" rather than the main character. And so on, and so on *sniff*. You get it. Appearance over reality, you're the main character, never change. Simples.

I feel like I could cobble together an argument whereby I proved Ronaldo was a narcissist but I just don't have it in me at present

V

I'm having a brainwave. What if I applied this framework, that focuses on the personal, and applied to the wider societal climate? Maybe that would explain some of the brainteasers I was working on fruitlessly earlier? Let's try it!

Assuming everyone is a narcissist means things suddenly make much more sense. Of course Maza has no idea why we're going after Lauren Duca, but loves when we go after other people, his concept of right and wrong is just "whatever me and my friends say is fine," and his dismay at seeing Lauren get piled on the way she did is just the dying spasm of whatever facility for guilt he has left.

Lubchansky refuses to acknowledge they're a fucking moron because that would require change. They're very comfortable in their position of Arbiter Of What Is Good, so someone telling them they're not actually helping is very likely to get ignored, unless, of course, it's another recognised Arbiter Of What Is Good, like another member of bluecheck Twitter. The bluecheck means outside forces have confirmed this person is good and therefore it's fine to listen to them.

Billionaires get off on Greta being horrible to them because it reinforces their identity. They may be "the nasty billionaires" but at least they are definitively something. And anyway it wasn't them that ruined everything, and they definitely don't have the power to do things differently. And if they do then there's a very, very good reason why they don't. What is it, you ask? uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

The Nobel Peace Prize is key because it is an "objective" measure of goodness. Since we have no internal measure of goodness, because we were raised by other narcissists that were raised by fucking abysmal boomer parents, external things like grades and qualifications and Nobel Peace Prizes are all we have, and since our parents didn't let us do anything in case it was dangerous, you ascribe very little meaning to action. "Our [you] is a very good [child]!" Why? I beg you follow that up with a thing they do, rather than the fact that they're your kid. Of course I am not suggesting that your parents should've loved you less, I'm just saying they should've let you fail at some point so that you had an idea of your strengths and especially your limitations, so you knew you who you were in relation to others, instead of just "good" for doing fuck all. It just might've been a shout, I don't know.

And Nwanevu's (and all of our) apprehension at how much society sucks? Our entire culture is narcissistic too, says Lasch, and is incredibly invested in never changing. How are you meant to change an incredibly stubborn system that is solely devoted to propagating itself when you can't even change yourself? "This economy is shit!" "Children are starving!" um, i'm Western FUCKING Civilisation(TM)???? i don't think you lot understand?????? never heard of End Of History? I don't HAVE to change!!!!! we nailed it already!!!!

Remember, I don't believe everything I write, this is just a framework for thinking about stuff. I do think there is a lot of merit to the concept though, especially when placed in the context of a few other things, the way Lou Keep does in The Uruk Machine and The Thresher. Narcissism, and its cousin, nihilism (read Lou to see how they link, I've wasted enough of your time), seems to paper over a lot of cracks in political theory, and explains a lot of things the orthodoxy doesn't. But does it offer any solutions?

VI

"Well? Do TLP, Lasch, Lou Keep, or Hotel Concierge offer any methods to overcome this epidemic, this culture, of narcissism?"
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha God no. It was over long, LONG, before it began, sweethearts.


Okay, fine, on a personal level, gleaned from about a year of trying to find answers in these bellends' work: change your ways while you're young, devote yourself to others, to concrete, relatively small causes at first ('the local soup kitchen', not 'ending homelessness' straight away), pick an identity and back it with action (I'm a writer not because I say so but because I just made you fuckwits read nearly 5000 words worth of my writings). On a structural level? I refer you to the above paper by Albarn, Coxon, et al(1999). Sorry I can't be more cheerful. Here's a dumb video.