Enmity Is the New American Pastime: Narcissism, Social Media, and the Pleasure of Personal Outrage
Sunday, November 23, 2025.
“A man without enemies is a man without qualities.” Sicilian proverb.
Some cultures perfect bread. Some perfect calligraphy.
America, in its eternal improvisational brilliance, has perfected enmity.
We manufacture it, distribute it, and export it globally like it’s a subsidized crop. Enmity is our artisanal sourdough—fermented, shared, photographed, and wildly overvalued.
Because our digital age just gave us an industrial-grade community kitchen.
But to understand why half the country seems permanently on the brink of a personalized holy war, we have to begin not with the Feed, but with the small, neglected psychological fact that we so often behave as if our self-worth depends on having an enemy.
Enmity offers us direction. It offers us meaning.
And in a lonely culture, it offers a kind of counterfeit intimacy—the brief connection of shared antagonism.
This is Cultural Narcissism’s final trick, and it’s a pretty good one.
The Narcissistic Pivot: From Admiration to Attention-by-Any-Method
Traditional clinical narcissism requires an audience (Campbell & Miller, 2011). Cultural Narcissism requires only a login. What used to demand charm, charisma, and a certain rakish cleverness now only requires an internet connection and unresolved childhood envy.
The equation is chillingly simple:
Visibility = Validity.
Engagement = Existence.
This is why enmity has become essential: it’s easier to get negative attention than to earn respect.
And narcissistic supply doesn’t discriminate. Admiration and outrage metabolize the same way in the nervous system—fast, hot, and temporarily soothing (Krizan & Herlache, 2018).
A woman I’ll call “Claire,” a couples therapy client, once told me she posted angry political content online because it made her “feel awake.”
She also offered that her marriage, she said, made her feel “sedated.”
What she needed was meaning; what she found instead was an online community of equally irritated strangers who bonded through synchronized contempt.
In psychological terms, she mistook arousal for aliveness.
That’s the real addiction: feeling something sharply enough to confirm you exist.
The Narcissism of Tiny Differences (Upgraded for the Feed)
Freud’s “narcissism of minor differences” (1930) was originally about how neighbors tear each other apart over trivial distinctions. The internet, with its open-plan global village, has turned that concept into a thriving industry.
If two people fundamentally see themselves as sensible, modern, conscientious citizens, they will despise one another’s microscopic deviations with almost erotic intensity:
You recycle but don’t compost?
You’re plant-based but still wear leather?
You care about social justice but watch reality TV?
The enemy becomes not the opposite, but the almost-twin.
Clinically, it’s textbook fragile self-concept maintenance.
In therapy sessions, you hear the same psychological tremor beneath these online battles:
“If you’re like me and disagree, then I might be wrong. And I cannot survive being wrong.”Enmity becomes a self-esteem flotation device.
The Social Media Amplifier: Grievance as Self-Branding
One of the most robust findings in current research is that moral outrage online is contagious and rewarded (Brady et al., 2021).
Platforms preferentially amplify moral-emotional language. They don’t do this because they’re evil—they do it because it works.
Nothing spreads like grievance, except measles, and we’ve handled both about equally well.
To understand how this plays out clinically, consider “Kevin,” a man whose marriage was buckling under the weight of his need to be publicly right. His wife described their home life as “living with a man who believes he is the Supreme Court.”
Kevin’s social media persona—righteous, combative, perpetually “educating” strangers—functioned as a side gig for his ego.
Outrage made him feel principled; rage made him feel principled and interesting. His rage posts garnered more likes than photos of their children.
He wasn’t addicted to conflict.
He was addicted to relevance.
Research shows that narcissistic traits strongly predict frequent social media use, antagonistic posting, and sensitivity to online criticism (Casale & Fioravanti, 2018).
This is not news to any therapist. Many of us learn early that in certain clients, the ego is a fragile Fabergé egg that must be kept on the highest shelf.
The Feed places it on a trampoline.
Enmity as Coping: A Culture Running on Emotional Junk Fuel
In public, Americans perform invincibility.
In private, their nervous systems are humming with unaddressed fear, loneliness, and economic precarity.
Enmity offers structure. It gives the psyche something to grip when the floor feels unstable.
Resentment is predictable.
Connection is risky.
So people choose resentment.
There’s an emerging literature showing that when individuals feel socially disconnected, they gravitate toward extreme in-groups and antagonistic out-group attitudes (Finkel et al., 2020). Politics becomes a projection screen for unresolved personal distress.
Interpersonal wounds are repackaged as cultural grievances. It’s psychotherapy in reverse.
A man with chronic shame turns into an online crusader against “idiots.”
A woman with abandonment trauma becomes a “truth teller” who humiliates strangers publicly to avoid feeling small privately.
These aren’t villains; they’re ordinary citizens without much of an emotional infrastructure.
Case Study: The Marriage That Outsourced Its Intimacy to Twitter
A couple I’ll call “Jon and Melissa” arrived for therapy after what Melissa described as “a five-year slow bleed of contempt.”
But what finally brought them in was not a fight over money or sex or parenting—but a tweet.
Jon tweeted something earnest and clumsy about masculinity.
It went mildly viral—with strangers mocking him.
Melissa laughed.
Jon felt humiliated—not because strangers mocked him, but because his wife did.
It wasn’t the tweet.
It wasn’t the disagreement.
It was the collapse of shared loyalty.
The online world had become their third partner—the one Melissa trusted to tell the truth, the one Jon feared more than God. Their marriage had externalized its intimacy and outsourced its emotional labor to an algorithm.
This is the cultural danger therapists now navigate: a client’s “inner world” often lives outside their body. Their identity is a cloud-based service.
Enmity becomes the emotional tether they rely on.
It stabilizes them when connection falters.
The Loneliness Machine: When a Whole Nation Bonds Through Hatred
The United States is experiencing levels of loneliness comparable to a public health crisis (Holt-Lunstad, 2021).
Loneliness is hunger—but psychological. People will eat anything to stop the feeling.
Enmity is the fastest food available.
It creates a pseudo-community with all the warmth of a bonfire and the psychological nutrition of gasoline.
Folks cluster around shared disapproval the way earlier generations clustered around shared faith or labor unions.
Communities used to have hymns.
Now they have hashtags.
The digital moral arena lets people become somebody—an identity, a voice, a force—by positioning themselves against somebody else.
The research term is identity fusion, but colloquially we could call it us-vs-everyone-who-disagrees-with-us-even-slightly.
How to Deprogram a Culture Addicted to Its Own Reflections
The antidote to enmity is not love; that’s for poets.
The antidote is what couples therapists have been peddling for decades:
Curiosity. Self-reflection. Ambivalence tolerance.
You know, basic haif-assed psychological adulthood.
But these are not culturally fashionable.
They require time, humility, and a willingness to be wrong—qualities that rarely produce any viral content of note.
Still, I tell clients the same thing I would tell the whole damn country:
If you want to feel less attacked, you have to stop living as if vulnerability is a crime scene.
Curiosity punctures narcissism.
It interrupts the performance.
It softens the edges of identity.
Most importantly, it lets folks be ordinary—complicated, contradictory, occasionally wrong humans—not symbols to fight or avatars to demolish.
Final Thoughts
The real cultural threat is not that we Americans dislike each other. Americans have always somewhat disliked each other; it’s practically our fucking folk dance.
The threat is that we’ve built a society where enmity feels safer than intimacy, where conflict feels truer than connection, and where narcissism masquerades as moral clarity.
If we want to evolve past this era of digital grievance, we must reclaim the old human skill of looking at another person without immediately drafting them into our psychological wars.
It’s not glamorous. It won’t trend. But what if it might make us more human?
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Brady, W. J., Wills, J. A., Jost, J. T., Tucker, J. A., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2021). The structure of moral outrage in online social networks. Nature Human Behaviour, 5(11), 1404–1412. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01122-x
Campbell, W. K., & Miller, J. D. (Eds.). (2011). The handbook of narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder: Theoretical approaches, empirical findings, and treatments. Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118093108
Casale, S., & Fioravanti, G. (2018). Why narcissists are at risk for developing Facebook addiction: The need to be admired and the need to belong. Addictive Behaviors, 76, 312–318. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.addbeh.2017.08.038
Finkel, E. J., Bail, C. A., Cikara, M., Ditto, P. H., Iyengar, S., Klar, S., Mason, L., McGrath, M. C., Nyhan, B., Rand, D. G., Tucker, J. A., & Druckman, J. N. (2020). Political sectarianism in America. Science, 370(6516), 533–536. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abe1715
Freud, S. (1930). Civilization and its discontents. Hogarth Press.
Holt-Lunstad, J. (2021). The major health implications of social connection. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 30(3), 251–259. https://doi.org/10.1177/09637214211002535
Krizan, Z., & Herlache, A. D. (2018). The narcissism spectrum model: A synthetic view of narcissistic personality. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 22(1), 3–31.