This really comes down to the question of objective reality.
There is an objective reality that is the same for all people. In the most fundamental sense, an individual can discover the objective reality by observing those behaviors that produce optimal results. Optimal results are measured by those results which produce lasting, long-term happiness and meaning for not just the individual but for the whole culture.
You can't trust yourself to just "do whatever you want" and then get there. You have to do a systematic test if you intend to use yourself as a test dummy to discover reality. You have to do it like Steve does with strict 30 day trials. It takes years of testing to answer the simplest questions... and this is just the nature of reality. Look at how long Steve takes to figure out the simplest questions like "What is the optimal diet?" Steve has been working on that question for like 15 years. 15 years!
If it takes 15 years to answer a simple physical based question like that, which has actually be investigated by thousands of human scientists for hundreds of years, how long is it going to take to discover the optimal answers about questions which are infinitely more complex - questions based on the incredibly subtle and complex human mind?
Subjective reality is not a realistic way to approach the mind. Humans are inextricably social creatures and we must depend on others. It's not realistic for each human to individually start as a blank slate and then test out all options and discover for himself which provide long-term happiness. He won't even know which provided long-term happiness until he tests his theories in the long-term. So he'll be 80 years old and then he'll know and by then it will be too late for him anyway. His only hope is to pass on the knowledge so that when he reincarnates someone else teaches it to him.
The ego is a massive complication in the pursuit of truth because the ego necessarily distorts your thinking. In those areas where you ego is attached, you can't think straight. All you thinking will be flawed.
Say for instance you have an addiction to sex. You can't think straight about sex while you are addicted to it. Your ego will cloud your mind with countless seemingly plausible logical arguments for why you should indulge yourself. This is the nature of a human being - a human being has lower impulses but he doesn't know he has them.
The narcissist is a person who, having crooked thinking due to egoic delusion, makes excuses for his lower impulses. His ego is thwarted by social norms which say that his brand of sex is delusional and his response to this is to reject social norms. This is the ego in action. The narcissist fundamentally is a person who fails to recognize that he is not perfect and that his current thinking is not representative of objective reality.
You can't trust 100% of your thinking anymore than you can trust 100% of your feelings. You must of course think and feel, but thinking and feeling should be tempered and bounded by the wisdom of past generations. This is why in other threads I have argued in favor of respecting the ancient wisdom teachings that have been passed down to us by every major culture independently.
The Catholic and Jewish teachings for instance on morality are fundamentally rules of life, sets of basic instructions that produce long-term happiness in a human. The Indian Vedas give nearly identical teachings, as do the Confucians and the Taoists and the Hopis and every other great culture. They all say roughly the same things presented using different metaphors.
My argument is that we should not abandon our wisdom inheritance from these ancient cultures which themselves spent thousands of years experimenting on how to live and then passing on their best advice. It is notable that all the cultures which survived passed on very similar advice. Time and again those cultures which deviated from the basic instructions lost prominence.
If a human is born into the world with certain vices, narcissism is when the human refuses to recognize his vices as vices, and instead calls them virtues. When the culture-at-large does not recognize his vices as vices, he rebels from the culture and creates his own cultural tradition which is similar to the past cultural tradition except for when it comes to his particular vice.
A lot of these people seem to be to drawn to the idea of "Subjective Reality" which has a valid, but limited, philosophical point, and they misuse subjective reality as a way to justify every maladaptive vice that their ego is attached to.
The psychological condition of narcissism is easily read about on wikipedia and you'll see that it contains many elements I'm referring to. Some forms of narcissism are not directly harmful to others (as someone above pointed out) but are certainly harmful to the narcissist himself at the very least.
If you are seeking to amuse yourself, and you find "the rules" are getting in your way, the odds are good that that is because you are going to do something which is harmful to yourself or others.
If the leaders of your particular social revolution do not display good lives - like if they themselves don't lead happy lives full of happy fulfilled people - then odds are good that that social revolution is bad for everyone.
Someone above mentioned that many of the modern heroes of society are clearly narcissists with countless psychological disorders. I would agree. This is definitely true. And invariably the revolutions they thrust on the society are not good things but bad things that contribute to ego-gratification in the short-term and human suffering in the long term.
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