Narcissism and the green ribbon of irrelevancy
Narcissism and the green ribbon of irrelevancy
An early memory of my childhood in suburbia was having to reluctantly attend summer recreation with throngs of hundreds of other eleven- and twelve-year-olds from my hometown. Summer vacation was meant to be enjoyed languishing, running around with the few kids that lived on my block, eating sugar, playing tag and so on. But whenever my mother decided to send me to recreation instead, July suddenly felt like September, and I was back with strange kids and stranger camp counselors who were seven or eight years old than us. Those were days of races, arts and crafts, flag football, and a host of other activities I didn’t like. But what made it particularly irksome for eleven-year-old me was the competitive sports, and naturally, the colored ribbons just about every now-elder Millennial remembers: blue, yellow, red, and of course, green—the participation ribbon. It was embarrassing to receive those. Over the years, they were stowed way in an old shoebox somewhere in New Jersey.
While my generation may not have been the first to be awarded the green ribbon of participation, its association with Millennials was notorious. Summer recreation camps were the breeding ground of the green ribbon, where the unathletic were crowned for their mediocre performance. Meant as a form of encouragement and perhaps even bolster some fading post-event self-esteem, the green ribbon had the opposite effect. Children, like adults, understand and are highly attuned to false pretense and subterfuge. Nobody adores fourth place, the first rank of the non-meritorious, non-awards. But more than its unsalutary effect, the green ribbon runs downstream of the kind of watered-down, “just for fun” events which are a hybrid performance in which the nerves of competition remain intact, but shuffled under a thin guise of play. For actual athletic children, it is wholly unserious and a way to flex their talent before an assembly of mixed skill levels. For the mixed skill levels, it is unenticing and unwarranted—in short, embarrassing. It is perhaps only the counselors, themselves children, who get any joy out of watching uncoordinated pre-pubescents flop all over themselves.
The late Christopher Lasch, a US historian who held strong views on these kinds of setups, presents a critique of the ideology surrounding this form of semi-athleticism which continues to find purchase on the world of fitness today. In his 1979 book, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Returns, Lasch excoriates the navel-gazing 1970s as a period of unvarnished cultural and social vanity in America. Lasch’s label of narcissism, however, was less psychological diagnosis than it might suggest. Narcissism is a lens through which the latest chapter in the long story of American capitalism could be understood. In typical Marxian analysis, Lasch tells the story of how the ethical and social morass of the 1960s continued to bleed out an already anemic social arrangement of traditional values. A certain class of post-radicals would enter the 1970s stripped not only of those values—they had long since casted them aside—but the larger progressive narratives which dictated societal change on a mass scale. While these individuals happily wandered down the trail of self-reverence and various therapies (including fitness), it would also contribute to the larger condition of anxiety and excitement brought on by the collapse of deep-seated ethics. What was left was a sort of febrile state, in which the individual could discover that the sky above his head was as limitless as much as it was bottomless beneath his feet.
In one particular section of the book, “The Degradation of Sports”, Lasch excoriates the transformation of sports under this new phase of American life. Games and athletic play did not neatly fit into a well-defined category throughout American history, or at least in the last century and a half, according to Lasch. Their “function” was that of release, he says. “Games simultaneously satisfy the need for free fantasy and the search for gratuitous difficulty” he claims. At the same time, they allow man to enlist all of his mental and physical faculties towards an end that has no discernable value or output in advancing a civilization. Thus, states Lasch, they were dismissed by the prudish Protestant social reformers of the late nineteenth century as utter distractions in the march towards a more orderly (and sober) society. Less than a century later, athletic games would be castigated from the opposite end of the political spectrum by the left, who slammed their competitive nature as practice runs for “militarism, fascism, sexism…you get the idea.
What is arguably more interesting was Lasch’s ruminations on spectatorship, and the changes it underwent as sports became increasingly professionalized as they became televised throughout the twentieth century. Thick into his critique of the prevailing literature at the time, Lasch pauses to consider what role spectators bring to sports, and their own sort of virtue:
It is by watching those who have mastered a sport, however, that we derive standards against which to measure ourselves. By entering imaginatively into their world, we experience the heightened form the pain of defeat and the triumph of persistence in the face of adversity. An athletic performance, like other performances, calls up a rich train of associations and fantasies, shaping unconscious perceptions of life. Spectatorship is no more ‘passive’ than daydreaming, provided the performance is of such quality that it elicits emotional response.
Lasch then goes on to hammer amateurism—the sort of type mentioned earlier—where “just have fun” becomes the main object, declawing, if you will, the competitive spiritedness of the game. Indeed both angles of Lasch’s critique are evident then as they are now. It’s also hard to know if there wasn’t a time when this kind of attitude prevailed, even if it was found in smaller doses and at smaller scales in pre-modernity (or at least before the nineteenth century). What Lasch does identify is how narcissism is found even when it decides to speak in the context of sports. Praising amateurism in games or athletic competition does not excite the senses of the athlete, it dulls them. When the rules are softened, concern for personal well-being is scaled to become the collective lens through which all participants are viewed. It displaces the game’s competitive spirit—the social “uselessness”—of why we play games as a means to escape the mundane and ordinary, as Lasch suggests earlier in the chapter.
Narcissism today appears as a virtually inescapable phenomenon. Were he alive today, Lasch would most likely nod that everything he observed in the 1960s and 1970s has now come to bear. This new phase of narcissism, however, ceases to retain its quality as something distinctly American. The Internet effuses on a global scale, not just the selfie, but the particular, narcissistic rules of how do properly do one, and how to project a narcissistic persona. Marshall McLuhan’s point behind his “the medium is the m[e]ssage” with the arrival of TV and the coming telecommunications revolution decades earlier. Even “scandal” and negativity associated with are handled in such a narcissistic way, that much of the so-called social media apology is mere entertainment and performance.
We witnessed this kind of digital narcissism and amateurism during the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics with the performance of Rachel “Raygun” Gunn, the thirty-seven-year-old Australian breakdancer and academic. Gunn’s complete mockery of breakdancing. Team Down Under suffered for weeks, after Gunn hopped like a kangaroo, orchestrating the kind of moves a teenager might do for a laugh in front of his friends. As expected, Gunn was poetically awarded no points, and became the subject of national embarrassment for weeks and months in various memes.
Gunn’s otherwise dismal rating did not seem to go unpunished, when Martin Gilian, the top judge of Olympic breakdancing, offered her consolation. “Breaking,” Martin informed the BBC, “[Is] all about originality and bringing something new to the table…and this is exactly what Raygun was doing.”
These are not simply kind words. In effect, they are a justification in minimizing one of the key components of the Olympics, of why the Games are considered the zenith of athleticism. Gunn completes the circle as she defends her performance in a manner that has now become all-too familiar among Millennials, and the younger generations more generally:
Notice the passive construction, when she states, “the backlash that the community has experienced” followed by the utter lack of responsibility which summarily follows: “but I can’t control how people react.” What is more telling however, is the odd tie-in to a kind of international, macro-level structural deficiency latent in the Australian breakdancing scene which she deploys to further distance her performance from herself: “Unfortunately, we just need some more resources in Australia for us to have a chance to be world champions.”
It’s tough to imagine that breakdancing, a sport of poor and working-class Bronxites who would quite literally drag out a flattened piece of cardboard box to use as their safety mat on concrete or blacktop pavement, as a game which requires a lot of resources to perform properly. This kind of subterfuge Gunn invites us to fall victim to represents the latest phase in Laschian narcissism. The predictable cadence of academia-derived grievance discourse, which attempts to drag out the tired excuses of victimhood, is then wedded to the larger structural deficiencies of Australia, a wealthy Western nation, as being on the wrong side of breakdancing-privilege. It is narcissistic amateurism at its finest. This attitude seeks to infect the ecology of Olympic competition, with all of its bloodless national rivalries, spectator-thronged roars of victory, and heartfelt stories of triumph overcoming defeat. Gunn’s green ribbonned excuses cannot survive in such an arena. They are perhaps better left elsewhere, condemned to a shoebox of irrelevancy.
Joe Lombardo holds a PhD from the New School for Social Research and is an avid writer and strength enthusiast. He is the Editor of Ultraphysical.