Who is Allowed to Love Themselves?

Kurt Vonnegut's classic Slaughter-house Five is a tale (or, given its postmodernist character, anti-tale) about the bombing of Dresden and the relation of time, space, causality and volition--as revealed to its protagonist by the extraterrestrials from Tralfamador who abduct him for display in their zoo. However, it may well be that the most oft-quoted passage in the book has to do not with these but rather Americans' attitude toward wealth and its possession, and particularly the attitude of those who do not have wealth toward themselves as a result of the lack. Believing the "destructive untruth that it is very easy for any American to make money" those Americans who have not done so "blame and blame and blame themselves," and end up loving neither themselves nor each other--an attitude of course urged on them relentlessly, not least by the "rich and powerful" for whom such "inward blame has been a treasure," letting them "do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class" in centuries.

The passage, which has clearly struck a chord with many in the half century since Vonnegut published it (and perhaps done so with more people as the years went by, given the turn of America's political culture), is a reminder that society--hierarchical, exploitative, unequal--does not treat "self-love" as equally the right of all its members, and never lets them forget it. Rather self-love is a privilege of the privileged, with the most extreme example of this monarchy--whose claimed prerogatives the ever-quotable Thorstein Veblen summed up as "inferiority complex with benefit of clergy." Those occupying such strata of privilege are treated not only as having the right to love themselves, but to narcissistically demand the love of everyone.

Quite naturally those of the less privileged strata who violate this rule by simply loving themselves are attacked for it. They are accused of "acting entitled," and should they give evidences of thinking that, in line with their love for themselves, they have not been treated as they think they ought to have been treated, they are accused of the grave sin and crime of "self-pity."

Those who fling about such accusations may think they are upholding morality. Instead they are likely doing the opposite, engaging in the highly immoral practice of moralizing. For after all, those quick to harangue others for their supposed failings in the manner described here tend to be too conventional, too conformist and too cowardly to ever accuse those whose behavior is truly entitled, truly a display of privilege, truly self-pitying, and in feeling so far more likely to be dangerous and harmful to others, because the feeling is combined with power and so inimical to the responsibility supposed to go with it.