The Superiority Complex

On the Psychopathology of Postmodern Everyday Life

© Martin Burckhardt & Leonardo.ai

Alfred Adler was probably the first of the founding fathers of psychoanalysis who dealt with the disorder he christened the inferiority complex and its defensive mechanism, the superiority complex. These are two variants of the same disorder. The inferiority complex could be understood as the introverted form, and the superiority complex as the extroverted form of this complex. If the first is a contrite flight from the world, the latter takes refuge in arrogance and grandiosity. And in doing so, the outside world is made responsible for giving the individual in question the appreciation they deserve. Both variants have in common that they avoid embarrassing humiliation resulting from a confrontation with the reality principle: confronting the World. In this sense, both complexes can be understood as a refusal to grow up, and their advantages are easily explained. Like a child, they allow us to continue making the outside world responsible for our well-being – we’re relieved of responsibility for our actions. Even more importantly, however, is that if the impulse to deny reality dominates, the phantasm of your own grandiosity can be maintained. This regressive moment is, of course, accompanied by a strange experience of loss. Or as Adler says: the child grows up as if they were in enemy territory – and here they are categorically not dealing with fellow human beings, but with counter-humans.

Alfred Adler (*1870; †1937

What Alfred Adler diagnosed as an individual psychological developmental disorder appears to be a template for the undesirable social development the American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt described as the coddling of the American mind.¹ Here, the impulse to deny the reality that Alfred Adler identified in the psychology of the spoiled child is repeated in a collectivized form. While the coddling of the child, on whom a suspicion of creativity is simultaneously and reflexively imposed, may be thoroughly well-intentioned, it becomes a form of neglecting their future prosperity that can prevent the child from entering adult life. And where the wish becomes the father of the thought, it becomes the mother of the illusion; the self settles into a fairytale world where wishing still helps. At this point, a seamless transition could be made from individual to social psychology. However, this would bypass a crucial question – the abysmal question of how it is even possible for an entire society to find itself in such a delusional situation. Adler's observation that the characteristic of the complex is based on an impulse to deny reality may be helpful here – as beneficial as my basic assumption that what we call reality is essentially dependent on the prevailing mental operating system. Since this has several dark spots, I began talking about a psychotope as a social unconscious some time ago. Now, as the talk of digital natives suggests, our time is in the throes of necessarily leaving the mechanical view of the world behind as we transition to a digital order. However, the question is relieved-out as to what prevents this pedagogical activity from becoming accomplished – if parental nurturing has become hypertrophied from over-coddling, precisely precluding the fulfillment of their task. The reason for this is simple: Because this transition is accompanied by a series of impositions to our current order of things, the new world is experienced as a source of narcissistic humiliation. It is not difficult to grasp this: when the University of Prague, as an exemplar, abolishes the bachelor thesis because it's no longer possible to tell if the paper was written by a student or by ChatGPT, this suspicion of plagiarism, translated into categorical terms shows that the European education system’s PISA reform, which was set in motion with such aplomb, has been a disaster – in that, we're dealing with a profound crisis of values. This values crisis is all the more profound because even this reform’s architects refused to take this into consideration and worked diligently to lower educational standards – which a posteriori may give the impression they wanted to work towards the apotheosis of ChatGPT. In reality, the rapid rise of machine learning makes it clear that the class politique and so-called elites have settled into Bullerbyn, whose primary rationale is not dealing with the humiliations that the digital world has in store for the individual, for God's sake.

Secretly, anyone who has tried deciphering just a few lines of Byzantine code knows this is a painful literacy exercise. And this is precisely the eerie message that even those who have successfully undergone it must convey: A different world begins here and demands figures of thought that’ve nothing in common with what tradition has taught us. And, because the messages reaching contemporaries from this other world seem cryptic, the bourgeois commentators proudly point out that they’re authentically unplugged and real. This, of course, answers what an Adelerian spoiled child has to do with the neglect of prosperity in our present day – and it lies within this impulse to deny reality. If we start from this premise, certain highly puzzling contemporary phenomena are relieved-out, making our current situation more straightforward to understand.

You don't have to look far to see this for yourself. It is impossible to overlook that there's been a strange form of moral economy spreading in recent years, and even more that figures of grandiosity have emerged who the whole world responsible for their well-being. And, in its purest form, this superiority complex manifests itself in the form of climate apocalyptics, who, generally lacking all factual knowledge, primarily appear as alarmists and prophets of doom. Yet their connection with the earth's mother, Gaia, is not only a sacred one but, above all, a highly practical one: because nature doesn't contradict. Since nature is not talking, the speaker may act as the deity's mouthpiece, reminding contemporaries that they owe her tribute (as the giver of all life). What the Gaia cult generously overlooks is that the edifice of civilization rests on mechané as the deception of nature – and that all the tools used to proclaim this message are thanks to the net's digital infrastructure. With this in mind, it is easy to see why the Earth Mother has been constructed as the great counter-figure. Standing under her protection, we may (like the apocalyptic prophets of old) believe ourselves to be clothed in robes of incontestability; here, we've rid ourselves of the impositions that would be imposed on the digital native. If we recall Adler's description of the children growing up as if they were in enemy territory, we can take this as a kind of climate-apocalyptic psychodrama. As an exemplar, the equation of death or life, as given by Roger Hallam, the founder of Extinction Rebellion, no longer knows any shades of gray, no nuances, no rationality.

We have a choice: either we surrender to death or we rebel to get the political elites to maximize our chances of survival.

Here, we’re dealing with a self-empowerment formula whose aim is not to solve a complex (and, incidentally, undisputed) problem but solely to serve the protester's sense of grandiosity.

Roger Hallam, photography by Jamie Lowe

In this sense, it is no coincidence that Carl Schmitt, of all people, has found favor with the climate alarmists. Because:

The sovereign is the one who decides on the state of emergency. (Carl Schmitt).

Hence, the Manichean program of this thinking – this is how you can delineate your superiority. And it's not only the climate pundits who've acquired discursive power as of late. It also applies to all those identity politicians who’ve transformed past injustice, that is, damaged identity, into a weapon of resentment – this inversion works, contributing to real victims Olympics so magnificently because it’s based on an insinuation of systemic injustice, indeed, of a fundamentally corrupt, toxic system. Then, some stand up for righting wrongs while placing themselves on a higher, superior moral level. What’s striking about all these grandiose formulas is that these discourses have soared to heights where words can no longer be taken at face value. It is precisely in this disconnection from reality where we can see the transition from the political to the moral economy. And because you leave the reality principle behind you, you can claim things and attitudes for yourself without ever having to prove them. Oscar Wilde described this disruption of the moral economy wonderfully:

A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it. One cannot…Even the finest and most self-sacrificing emotions have to be paid for…just as they borrow their ideas from a sort of circulating library of thought — the Zeitgeist of an age that has no soul — and send them back soiled at the end of each week, so they always try to get their emotions on credit, and refuse to pay the bill when it comes in.²

Where everything is available below the purchase price, the epistemic is hijacked by bullshit; aesthetics turned into kitsch; and morality into what’s called moral grandstanding³: virtue-signaling. In this sense, we could speak of a form of psychic inflation. Just as following Gresham's logic, good money is being displaced by bad money, beauty, truth, and goodness are being replaced by their simulations, and even inverse tendencies may take them over. When the battle cry ‘follow the science’ immediately turns into the ostracization of deniers and apostates; science's ethos has long been left behind and is now exploited like the inquisitors of the Middle Ages.

Certainly, the biggest question in this context is how formerly high-quality institutions began subscribing to these grandiose formulas and how it was even possible for them to take all these morally inflated formulas at face value. This assumption is the only reason psychic inflation has spread like this, but when you realize that all of this has happened against the backdrop of a shifting mental operating system, it becomes much more understandable. Imagine an institution, say the Royal Society, suddenly hit by a shitstorm because, as in the case of Sir Tim Hunt, one of its members made allegedly sexist remarks at a symposium in Seoul.⁴ Shocked by the public vehemence of this reaction, the members of the Institute naturally assume these accusations are true – and so the unfortunate victim has become a non-person overnight even before his plane has reached English soil – and it's a matter of course that he should be removed from all his posts. Because the accusations are circulating on Twitter and receiving extensive media coverage, the fact that they are entirely unfounded no longer matters. Analyzing the institution's reaction, what stands out above all is the media illiteracy, the inability to classify such accusations for what they are: Forms of resentment in which a Twitter mob pounces on a defenseless individual whose scalp – since he's a Nobel Prize winner after all – promises all those involved a surplus of symbolic surplus value. While the accusers may not have brought anything worth mentioning into the world, they have nevertheless managed to drag an institution down. It's this pattern we see repeatedly in the moral economy, whether it's the case of a monument being pulled down or a past masterpiece being attacked. Because in an interest economy, it’s the attention of the scandal, representing a form of monetizable surplus value, that makes it possible for such grandiose formulas to gain the upper hand in a psychic economy – which is why it’s highly rational for an institution to give itself the appropriate coat of paint. Consequently, the toothpaste manufacturer lets the lived experience of all conceivable minorities speak for it; hedge funds, gender-sensitized, declare themselves the guardians of diversity’s grail of equality and inclusivity; while universities aren’t only converted into safe spaces, but they even put themselves at the service of teachings diametrically opposed to their ethos. The fatal thing about this disruption to the psychic economy is it becomes a principle of reality – at least as long as we can’t decipher the underlying psychic inflation.

At this point, Alfred Adler's observations can be quite enlightening, even in abbreviated terms of individual psychology. He makes clear that the superiority complex ultimately boils down to antisocial behavior. This progressive loss of public spirit is perhaps the past decade's signature. If people, instead of being able to rely on the benevolence of their fellow human beings, have the feeling they're in enemy territory, then this is evidence our discourses are suffering from inferiority and superiority complexes – which, in turn, suggests a disturbed relationship with reality. And, in turn, if psychic inflation becomes a reality principle, it’s feared that from now on, everyone will see others not as fellow human beings but as counter-humans – and this is the individual psychological description of what is meant by molecular civil war.

Translation: Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt

---

Related Content

1. This essay, co-authored with Greg Lukianoff in 2015 for The Atlantic, which they later expanded into the book The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, Penguin, 2018.

2. From De Profundis, written by Wilde in 1897; in The Letters Of Oscar Wilde, ed. Rupert Hardt-Davis, New York, 2000, p. 501.

3. Tosi, J. Y Warke, B. – Moral Grandstanding. In: Philosophy & Public Affairs 44(3), June 2016. p. 197-21.

4. I have devoted a longer essay to this case. Burckhardt, M. - Im Netz der kleinen Brüder Über die Modernität der Populismen, Merkur, vol. 806, June 2016.