I drafted this post way back on 10/4/2024 when I read Main character syndrome Anna Gotlib from Aeon. Like several recent posts, I do not know why it was not posted earlier. Maybe because I excerpted so much material from the original essay?
I think this attracted me because I am trying to skirt auto-fiction while sticking more of my autobiography into "Chasing Ashes".
Because I am a philosopher, and thus tend to be rather bad at letting go of ideas – especially ideas without good answers – my close brush with YouTube fame led me to consider other instances of what has come to be called ‘main character syndrome’ (MCS) or, perhaps more annoyingly, ‘main character energy’. Not a clinical diagnosis but more a way of locating oneself in relation to others, and popularised by a number of social media platforms, MCS is a tendency to view one’s life as a story in which one stars in the central role, with everyone else a side character at best. Only the star’s perspectives, desires, loves, hatreds and opinions matter, while those of others in supporting roles are relegated to the periphery of awareness. Main characters act while everyone else reacts. Main characters demand attention and the rest of us had better obey.
When I was young, one thing my mother worried about me was being an introvert. She took away my books at one point (except for those I hid from her; upon finding them, she gave up the idea I read too much.). Few people know how shy I am. I learned to manage my misgivings about groups by plunging in and controlling my reception. Where I cannot do this, I like to fade into the background. Generally, speaking that is what I prefer. I think my PO keeps expecting me to go on the prowl (at 64, the thought of prowling is beyond absurd to the point of ridiculousness; introversion and ridiculousness are closely bound together for me) when what I want is quiet and being alone. It may strike many odd, but I have not found myself either lonely or alone living by myself.
Autofiction stikes me as too much exhibitionism.
I write this blog because the government wants me to be on display. This I will lean into. Otherwise, I could find another way to collect my notes.
As a philosopher and a narrativist, I am an unabashed supporter of the view that selves are something that we create together, through shared stories. What is a narrative? In short, anything that can be read, spoken, heard, written, viewed or otherwise expressed – and this certainly includes social media. In telling stories, we create and reveal who we think we are; in listening to the stories of others, we help to mould and sustain them as persons. Stories are thus foundational to how we view the world and our place in it, and through them we can make ourselves morally intelligible to ourselves and to others.
I grew up with people telling stories. Whether this was a remnant of a Scots and/or Irish culture I really do not know, for all I like to play with the idea. Those stories tied us together - past, present, and future.
What I did not connect was social media with narratives. When I was on Facebook and Twitter, it was to promote my law practice. I spent too much time in Yahoo Chat; it led me into places I went for naughty adventures. Yahoo Chat sucked up too much time in uselessness (although, I must admit I think it helped with me fashioning dialog and fiction, but at too much of a cost.) Since my arrest and continuing through my release, I find nothing attractive about Facebook or X or Yahoo Chat. Social media is not on my radar except as a sinkhole to waste the little time I have left me.
Until this article, Main Character Syndrome was also off my radar. The following excerpt is long because it ended my ignorance.
And this is also where we run into a problem. Setting aside critiques within philosophy itself of a narrative view of morality as epistemically unreliable and without any foundational principles, there are also worries that bear more directly on our current topic: if social media is a kind of narrative, can narrativists, such as myself, defend it on the same grounds as other narrative ways of understanding ourselves and the world? And if the answer is ‘yes’, then why am I spending all this time worrying about main character syndrome and its many stories.
Driving on one of New York’s poorly maintained and crowded roads, I found myself in a situation one can more safely observe through numerous YouTube ‘bad driver’ videos: a driver for whom all other traffic apparently ceased to exist confidently pulled into a lane I already happened to occupy. After a quick manoeuvre that probably spared me a role in one of the aforementioned videos, I said, perhaps louder than was necessary, to nobody in particular: ‘Is this [deleted] aware of anything but his own [deleted]?’
Because I am a philosopher, and thus tend to be rather bad at letting go of ideas – especially ideas without good answers – my close brush with YouTube fame led me to consider other instances of what has come to be called ‘main character syndrome’ (MCS) or, perhaps more annoyingly, ‘main character energy’. Not a clinical diagnosis but more a way of locating oneself in relation to others, and popularised by a number of social media platforms, MCS is a tendency to view one’s life as a story in which one stars in the central role, with everyone else a side character at best. Only the star’s perspectives, desires, loves, hatreds and opinions matter, while those of others in supporting roles are relegated to the periphery of awareness. Main characters act while everyone else reacts. Main characters demand attention and the rest of us had better obey.
You have probably heard of MC behaviour – or perhaps even witnessed it online or in person. A TikToker and her followers physically push aside those inconvenient extras ‘ruining’ their selfies – and then post their grievances on social media. A man on a crowded subway watches a loud sports broadcast without headphones while ignoring other commuters’ requests to turn it down a bit. This is no mere rudeness: in the narrowly circumscribed world of main characters, the rest of us are merely the insignificant ghosts who happen to intrude on their spaces. Akin to chess pieces, or perhaps to animatronic figures, we have agency only in the development of the MC’s story. In current parlance, we are non-player characters (or NPCs) – a term that originated in traditional tabletop games to describe characters not controlled by a player but rather by the ‘dungeon master’. In video games, NPCs are characters with a predetermined (or algorithmically determined) set of behaviours controlled by the computer. Rather than agents with a will and intent, NPCs are there to help the MC in his quest, to intersect with the MC in preset ways, or to simply remain silent – a kind of prop, or perhaps human-shaped furniture, a part of the scenery. Another way to view NPCs is to imagine what the philosopher David Chalmers calls a philosophical zombie, or p-zombie, a being that, while physically identical to a normal human being, does not have conscious experience. If a p-zombie laughs, it’s not because it finds anything funny – its behaviour is purely imitative of the real (main character!) individual. For someone convinced of their MC identity, the rest of us are, perhaps, just so many zombies.
TikTok I avoid like a plague.
I do not want to be treated like a zombie, so I will not treat others as zombies. This, I guess, coincides with what I admire about Immanuel Kant is the idea that people are not meant to be means, only ends. That is what I really did wrong back in 2009.
While Chalmers’s p-zombie is a part of a philosophical hypothetical concerned with the nature of mind and consciousness, the non-philosophical take on people as NPCs is deeply morally worrying. Having taught and written for a number of years in the areas of ethics and moral psychology, one of the central ideas that I have tried to explain and make more vivid is that morality is something that we do together, that our ideas about who we are require each other’s engaged participation, and that an empathetic openness not only to each other’s moral agency, but to each other’s emotional states, is central to our shared lifeworld. We must see others as fully human, and be engaged with each other as moral beings to understand who we are, and who we are in relation to others and to the world.
But the main character narrative denies all these possibilities. It is destructive to views of human beings as fundamentally relational and interdependent, and poses a threat to two important experiences of being human: the first is connection to others; the second is love.
People contain universes. I learned that more than 40 years ago from TJ. Seeing them as only zombies would make my experiences with and of others drab and without any taste.
The answer has something to do with the kinds of stories MCS offers. On the one hand, narrative approaches to morality and identity centre both speaking and hearing – sharing and uptake – emphasising the importance of multivocality, of shared discourse, of mutual intelligibility. They point toward the moral significance not just of one’s own stories, but of the narratives of others as guides to understanding the fundamental interdependence of human identities.
On the other hand, narratives spun by the main character have little interest in, or patience for, the stories of others; they are anything but interdependent. They care nothing for mutual intelligibility. Only the main character, his perspective, his story and his solitary self, matter. In this version of narrative selfhood, there is room only for the singular speaker, and his singularly important chronicle. Yet, as narrativists will often note, not all narratives are good, or desirable, or to be encouraged.
I commend the writings of William James to one and all. They are accessible for any reader - I read him first when I was 18, before college - and I think his idea of a pluralistic universe is relevant here.
...The idea that the world “tells one story” James continues, is a “monistic dogma.” One must “see the world’s history pluralistically, as a rope of which each fibre tells a separate tale ; but to conceive of each cross-section of the rope as an absolutely single fact, and to sum the whole longitudinal series into one being living an undivided life, is harder (W, 548). It is harder precisely because even at a moment there is no single point of view from which the “whole rope” is visible.
If a person is a collection of stories, then they too are a rope, of which we cannot see the whole. Then each person is braided into the rope of humanity.
Many attracted to life as a main character are seeking some kind of love, or approval, or reassurance that they matter. They are looking for a feeling, a vibe. But love is more than an affective stance. Erich Fromm, in The Art of Loving (1956), defines love as an artistic practice, noting that ‘individual love cannot be attained without the capacity to love one’s neighbour, without true humility, courage, faith and discipline.’ For him, love is ‘an activity, not a passive affect’ – in order to truly love, it is insufficient to merely feel; what is required is responsibility for the care of the beloved. Yet MCS denies us the ability to do exactly that – to genuinely, humbly love anyone or anything. To the conquering hero, all interactions are transactional, all awe self-directed.
Where does this leave us? MCS is not a puzzle to be solved via a ‘do and don’t’ listicle. It is not a social problem against which laws can be passed. Instead, it calls on us to engage in what Joseph Campbell, among others, called a ‘dark night of the soul’. This might mean sitting with our anonymity, solitude, boredom and lostness; pushing back on the equivocation between performance and authentic connections; making ourselves vulnerable to others, and thus to failure. It might mean seeing ourselves as always incomplete – and recognising that fulfilment might not be in the cards, that life is not a triumphant monomyth, and others are not here to be cast in supporting roles. Myself, I tend to turn to Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame (1957), where a character reminds us: ‘You’re on earth, there’s no cure for that!’ Sounds about right – let’s begin there.
It could well be what we need is strong ethics, then we jump into the river of life and enjoy the currents, wherever they take us.
sch 11/20
(What is the connection between the turn to performative politics and MCS? Just wondering after reading Nancy Mace is just the absolute worst. sch 11/21/24)
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