Is everyone really a narcissist?

Rabbi Landau answers that in one sense, yes: “everyone has a certain percentage that they care about themselves before they care about someone else.” Today everyone is calling the other one a narcissist, and he says the word “has been used and abused and overused so much that it lost its meaning.”

He explains that caring for yourself first is not a flaw in itself. “It has to be that way,” he says, because even in halacha, your life comes before someone else's life. Any creature has some of this, “otherwise it wouldn't be able to survive.”

He compares it to food. “You need to eat food. Question always is, at which point you are overeating?” The same is true here. You need a certain amount of self-concern in order to survive. The real question is not whether you have it, but whether it has grown past what is healthy.

He does not deny that the real thing exists. “Don't get me wrong, there are real, real bad narcissists out there.” But healthy people care about themselves, while real narcissists, as he puts it in his caption, care almost only about themselves.

Going deeper: Rabbi Landau's teaching, level by level

Surface claim

Everyone cares about himself to some degree, and the word “narcissist” has been overused until it lost its meaning.

Fear, vulnerability, or tension

Once the word is used on everyone, it stops meaning anything, even though, as Rabbi Landau stresses, there are “real, real bad narcissists out there.”

Underlying need or longing

Is it wrong to look after yourself first?

Rabbi Landau teaches that a person needs “a certain amount” of self-concern “to survive.” In A Soul at Peace he writes that every created being, simply by being created, was given the power to protect itself.

Deepest human truth

Like eating, self-concern is necessary. The question is never whether you have it, but at which point it becomes “overeating.”

More questions from this teaching

• Is it selfish to take care of yourself before others?