Don’t be shy: a dose of narcissism is good for you | Oliver Burkeman

The unhealthy narcissist's secret fear is that if he's not God, he's nothing. The healthy narcissist knows the middle way

In what undoubtedly qualifies as one of the sickest burns in modern politics, Denmark's finance minister, Kristian Jensen, observed last year, "There are two kinds of European nations: there are small nations and there are countries that have not yet realised they are small nations." Jensen's not-so-veiled swipe at Britain was more accurate than he knew. In a recent study, people from 35 nations were asked "What contribution do you think the country you are living in has made to world history?": 0% meant none, 100% meant they were responsible for all of it. The average British answer was 55% - a level of self-importance exceeded only by Russia, at 61%. The Swiss came bottom at 11%; the Americans, despite a reputation for national egomania, at a relatively modest 30%. Of course, there's no way to measure a country's true "percentage of history-making", as Jesse Singal put it on the Research Digest blog. But we can be sure that people wildly overestimate their own: added up, the averages from each country came to 1156%.

Look around and you might conclude we could do with much less "national narcissism", as the study labels it, and less of the individual variety, too. But the fact that it's so universal (let's face it, even that Swiss percentage is surely far too high) suggests a caveat. While too much narcissism is unhealthy, for nations and individuals alike, a certain degree of inflated self-regard may be natural, even necessary. Wouldn't it be psychologically crushing to go through life with an absolutely objective understanding of how little you and your country matter today, let alone in the context of history? National narcissism may be a bit like the (admittedly controversial) idea of "depressive realism", which suggests that depressed people have a more accurate sense of their ability to influence events than the non-depressed. With a genuine idea of your own importance, it might be hard to get out of bed in the morning.