Occupied Territories

According to [Alexander Mitscherlich], National Socialism is, among other things, a response to a “narcissistic offence” that modernity afflicted upon men by exposing them to a world of images and looks that do not reciprocate his own. Building on Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer who understood the conservative reaction to Weimar modernity in terms of an “aestheticization”, Mitscherlich interpreted the public propaganda of images and media orchestrated by the National Socialists as a cultural revolution which tried to organize collectively the eye that returns the gaze, the eye of the benevolent father, and the look of the significant other.

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Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses (2009)

Not only is this a brilliant, and in my opinion absolutely spot-on, insight about the impact of modernity on narcissism, but one could easily extrapolate this idea beyond Nazi Germany: if modernity threatens us with a “narcissistic offense,” one can only imagine the havoc that the internet has wreaked on our psyches. In fact, is this or is this not the simplest way to describe the internet: “a world of images and looks that do not reciprocate [our] own”?